Total Recall

Viacom Outdoor recently revealed new research proving that the longer a person spends with an ad, the more likely they are to absorb its content. Steve Cox, strategic planning director at the company explains how the study set about proving its hypothesis…

The past couple of years have seen “engagement” truly enter the communications planning lexicon, and become something of a Holy Grail for media owners seeking to demonstrate that the media solutions they offer will truly capture and captivate consumers. The difficulty is that, whilst we all intuitively have a feel for what engagement means in a communications context, precise definition and measurement of the concept is a real challenge.

At Viacom Outdoor we’ve made addressing this challenge a real priority over the past 18 months as it’s been essential in supporting our business objectives. It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that we’ve recently been successful in the pitch to end all pitches, winning the rights to sell all London Underground’s sales inventory until 2015.

The Underground is a unique and valuable media property, offering an environment that engages Londoners on the move in a way that conventional posters cannot. Our task has been to devise research studies that investigate this and dramatise the benefits for our customers. We’ve set out to demonstrate how engagement on the Underground really works.

Previously the London Commuter Study proved that Londoners actually welcome the presence of the advertising they see on the Tube, and our Captive Message Time analysis showed that nearly a third of all the time Londoners spend with advertising is spent viewing posters on platforms or in Tube carriages. Both of these increased our understanding of what the extra “dwelltime” provided by Underground formats really delivers. On average we stand on a platform for around three minutes waiting for our next train, and once it arrives we spend around 13 minutes sat in front of the ads inside the carriage. But there was still much we didn’t know.

We knew that looking at a poster for three minutes was better than looking at it for 10 seconds. But why is it better, and exactly how much better? And was this really an advantage for a simple “branding” ad carrying little or no copy to digest? And could extra dwelltime be proven to be beneficial in driving response or purchase? Our Total Recall study, devised and carried out in conjunction with TNS set out to provide some answers.

Our goal was simple. Investigate the hypothesis that extra time spent viewing an advertisement will result in extra engagement. To this end we recruited 300 representative Londoners on Regent Street during the month of July. They were simply asked if they wished to take place in a short research study, offered a small incentive, and shown to a nearby hall. On arrival they were kept in a waiting room for three minutes before being directed to a smaller room where the research was to take place. We placed four different posters in the waiting room, and they passed another four on their way to the “research room”.

Until they sat down with the researcher they were unaware that it would be their engagement with the posters that we would be investigating. The posters were rotated throughout the study so that some respondents viewed an ad for three minutes, others viewed the same ad for a matter of seconds.

So what did we learn? As expected, the posters were more engaging when viewed in the long dwelltime environment. On average, respondents who had been exposed to the ad in the waiting room were six times more likely to remember seeing it at all, 14 times more likely to recall the brand correctly, and four times more likely to remember details about the message the ad was conveying. In simple recall terms, ads were working six times harder in a long dwelltime environment.

But we didn’t stop there. TNS are highly regarded in the field of creative pre-testing, and utilise a proprietary process called “AdEval” when working in this field. This battery of scientifically designed questions enables them to identify the extent to which a prospective ad is likely to either have no effect, involve consumers without motivating them, or genuinely motivate them into feeling more positive and empathetic towards the brand advertised.

We decided to utilise this technique and investigate whether the effect of observing ads for longer resulted in more motivated consumers feeling more positive towards the brands advertised. What we discovered was that the same ad when viewed in the longer dwelltime environment was up to 75% more effective in engendering positive feelings towards the brand – the first step on the route to driving purchase. And this effect was present for both “long copy” and “simple branding” creative executions.

Total Recall has more than fulfilled our objectives. We’ve now proved what we intuitively believed – that extra exposure results in higher engagement. Ads are more likely to be remembered, message detail more likely to be communicated, and consumers more likely to feel positive about the brands advertised as a result. Maybe we still can’t deliver a “quantified engagement rating”, but we’re much better informed about what the word actually means as a result of the study.