Who won the Metro?

Have you ever wondered which ads placed in the national newspapers are the most effective at engaging readers? Newsline has partnered with Lumen Research to find out.

Don’t you just love it when someone takes a work of genre-defining art – indeed, the very pinnacle of creative cinematic brilliance – and uses it to flog car insurance? Perhaps you also get a sense of overwhelming joy when you see a world-class actor – who you love dearly – reprise a role so they can finally build that orphanage orangery next to their private lobster farm?

So OK. We’re conflicted about this week’s Who Won the Metro? But love or hate, perhaps it explains the striking engagement rates for Direct Line’s new integrated campaign featuring Mr Wolf, the fixer from cult movie Pulp Fiction.

With stand-out at 86% and an engagement of 3.4 seconds, this press ad has beaten all norms. But was the high engagement simply outrage that one of cinema’s greatest actors would sell-out, or because people were genuinely happy to have such an iconic character make it back to fix one more job?

Whatever your views on this one, one thing remains clear: the press can be an excellent amplifier of a TV campaign. As Mike Follett, founder of Lumen Research notes: “This strong integration of the campaign is helping to deliver the high level of stand-out and engagement.

“This technique is called Prestige Appeal. It is effective because recommendations from familiar faces are proven to be more effective than those that aren’t. To put it simply, readers find easily recognisable figures more trustworthy.”

On the Direct Line website there is also much more about the Mr Wolf character – further corroborating the story with a TV ad.

“By making sure Mr Wolf’s character is consistent across all points of contact for customers, Direct line have successfully applied the ‘Familiarity Principle’ or ‘Mere-Exposure effect’ a term coined by the social psychologist Robert Zajonc in the 1960s,” Follett says.

So marketing genius or way-to-ruin-my-favourite-film? You decide.

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