Neuroscience reveals what makes TV ads memorable
Human interaction, anticipation and music dating back to before the year 2000 are just a handful of the things that have been scientifically proven to help make TV advertising more effective and memorable.
A new study, conducted by Neuro-Insight and commissioned by Thinkbox, has revealed a strong correlation between certain TV advertising creative and long-term memory encoding (LTME), which is thought to have a significant impact on decision-making and future behaviour.
Analysing over 150 ads and coding them each against 50 different creative factors, the study found that TV ads which included contrast, breaks and pauses – such as changes in pace or sound – created a 20% higher response than other ads, while ads featuring live filming of real people, emotion and humour increased LTME by 15%.
A high level of human interaction was also found to be key, with LTME responses 10% higher than those with a low level.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, music was also found to be a key factor in creating LTME, working best when it drives the action of the ad – for example when lyrics or the cadence of the music matched what was on screen. Ads that did this generated a 14% higher memory encoding response compared with when music was a recessive background feature.
Interestingly, ads with music dating back to before the year 2000 had an 8% higher response than more recent chart hits.
In terms of celebrity sponsorship, while the use of celebs had no significant impact on brain response at end branding, a celebrity delivering the call to action in the ad increased memory encoding by 13%.
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In contrast, the study found that neither ethnicity of characters in TV ads, nor the portrayal of women in ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ female roles makes a difference to memory encoding.
The overt selling of products and emphasising hard facts and scientific information also ranked low on the LTME scale, as did claims and demonstrations, calls to action, voiceover and dialogue, music genre, children and animals, and type of narrative structure.
“The UK ad industry has an exceptional tradition of creativity in TV advertising,” said Heather Andrew, UK CEO of Neuro-Insight.
“These insights should complement that expertise not by prescribing a to-do list for advertisers, but by giving an understanding of how specific ad elements can heighten creative effectiveness and lead to improved ROI for brand advertisers.”
Matt Hill, research and planning director at Thinkbox, added: “There is no recipe for success in TV advertising. But what this fascinating study by Neuro-Insight shows is that there are lessons to be learned from how the brain reacts to different creative approaches.
“It provides some good rules of thumb to bear in mind for increasing the likelihood of ads being remembered for the long-term.”
The study also revealed the importance of ‘conceptual closure’ – a pattern of brain activity that occurs when a sequence of events apparently comes to an end – and the point at which it appears in an ad.
The brain treats conceptual closure as a ‘punctuation point’ – it takes what it has just seen, bundles it together and files it away – and while it is occupied doing this, it is relatively unreceptive to new information and brain responses fall sharply for a second or so.
If conceptual closure happens immediately before a key branding moment in an ad, the branding will coincide with the period of low receptivity and so is likely to be missed.
The study found that in those ads that suffered from conceptual closure at the end of the ad, memory encoding fell on average by around 30% in the moments moving into final branding.
Therefore, Neuro-Insight suggests that any ‘reveal’ in an ad should happen a few seconds before the end branding, or feature the brand as a key part of the ‘reveal’ itself, in order to avoid the negative impact of conceptual closure.