Change the ad, change the effect

19/April/2001

The book is an attempt to marry theories of memory and learning, as developed by neurologists and psychologists, with the practice of advertising. Du Plessis, a one-time advertising agency media director, has for many years run the Johannesburg research agency Impact Information with its Adtrack system of monitoring the memorability of television advertising.

This is done via a continuous survey that involves telephoning every week 200 respondents who are questioned about what advertising they can remember for named brands. Adtrack has built up a database of 20,000 ads.

Two of the examples given in the book concern TV ads for Kelvinator domestic appliances. One showed a Ford van delivering a load of appliances to a farmhouse to the joy of the family living there.

"We tracked this commercial for several weeks and could hardly find a respondent that could describe the ad when we mentioned Kelvinator appliances," writes du Plessis.

"We then realised that the first brand mentioned in the commercial was in fact the branding of Ford on the delivery vehicle. When we asked respondents if they had seen an advertisement for Ford delivery vehicles they all described the advertisement with the vehicle delivering stuff to the farmhouse.

"In terms of the neurological model of memory one can understand what happened. In interpreting the advertisement the first brand neural network that was activated was Ford, and the advertisement memory was laid down linked to the brand that was activated for the longest period.

"The problem was easy to rectify by getting a touch-up artist to remove the branding from the vehicle."

Another Kelvinator commercial, for a twin-tub washing machine, showed two baby elephants playing in the mud and then their mother washing their nappies in the machine. The commercial showed up well in the Adtrack survey, but sales were at first disappointing. The reason, says du Plessis, was that the manufacturer had designed a two-hearts logo for the machine and had launched a national promotional campaign featuring this logo, which had no memory link to the elephants theme.

When a second promotional campaign supervened, featuring cardboard elephants as the point-of-sale material, sales shot up. Du Plessis calls this "a nice demonstration of how advertising works at the time of purchase. When the promotional material reminded people of the advertisement at the time when they were making purchase decisions the advertisement came to mind and could influence the decision."

Du Plessis quotes at length a conversation he had with Professor Bahrick of Ohio, an expert on learning, which led to the suggestion that the most effective media schedule for putting an advertising message across would involve "a relatively high frequency of exposure at the start and then a decreasing frequency over time."

This is an approach recommended by neither of two of the most influential writers on the subject: Mike Naples, whose 1978 study recommended that the target audience should get three or more advertising exposures, and John Philip Jones, who in 1995 laid it down that the biggest response in any seven-day period came from the first exposure.

Du Plessis is an adherent of the view that likeability is a good predictor of an ad's effectiveness, and likeability scores are built into Impact's Adtrack survey. Likeability, in the broadest sense, is also the basis of his agency's Commap copy-testing system.

The Dutch edition of The Advertised Mind is entitled Reclame ons brein and is published, price 69 guilders, by Sansom, a subsidiary of Wolters Kluwer. Anyone interested in obtaining it should contact Mrs Lise van de Kamp, at Samsom, Prinses Margrietlaan 3, Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands. Tel: +31 (0)172 466 633. E-mail: lvdkamp@kluwer.nl

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