A recent Adweek guest column by Martin Olesky (“Why Does Your Brand Wait Until :29 to Show Up in Your Ad,” published July 15, which can be found here) bemoaned the absence of brand names for the first 29 seconds of many 30-second commercials. It advised introducing the brand earlier and mentioning it more often, with Olesky explaining that people forget the name of the product/brand if it is not repeated early and often.
Olesky, the founder and creative director of Flying Minds Agency, offered the right advice, but for the wrong reasons. He also made two serious mistakes in his assumptions. One was asserting that brand recall is key to purchase; the second was that product placement in a show is ineffective because it is cheesy. My claim is not simply my opinion; a great deal of research strongly supports my assertions.
Problems with Conscious Recall
Let me begin with the mistakes. Conscious recall is not proof that an ad is effective. Although this flies in the face of common sense, not realizing that something was presented can be more effective than explicit recognition.
There is a well-established phenomenon in psychology called the mere exposure effect. Research shows that the more often something is presented to people, the more they tend to like it (within limits and certain technicalities). The reason is that the more often something is presented, the easier it becomes to mentally process or, in the terminology of the science, the more fluent it becomes. People like fluency; they like easier and quicker processing. That’s where Olesky has it right: Multiple presentations of a brand or product do lead to better results. But here is where he got it wrong: This is not because of better recall but because of the greater fluency underlying the mere exposure effect.
Why Mere Exposure Works
Here is the counterintuitive rub. The mere exposure effect is stronger if the person is not aware of the stimulus or experience being repeated, which was clearly shown in a review of studies (called a meta-analysis) conducted by the psychologist Robert Bornstein. Moving to an ad, the mere exposure effect is stronger when the person does not know that the brand or product has been repeated. So, conscious recall is not a valid measure. This also explains why product placement does work and works best when it is subtle.
Why does this happen? How can we like things better when we don’t know we have seen them? Prof. Bornstein explains that when we are aware, we can discount the effects of mere exposure because we know what is going on. When we are not aware, we cannot discount the effects; we simply experience greater fluency, which results in greater liking. Mere exposure works in both instances. But it works better in the case where we cannot discount the effects and that is most likely when awareness is lacking.
An Issue of Measurement
This leads to a measurement problem. If recall is not the best outcome, what is? We can’t ask people because their conscious responses won’t capture the process.
But there are two scalable answers: One is presenting the brand/product too quickly to be processed consciously but slowly enough to be processed emotionally, and then measuring the reaction. The second is through reaction time technology that examines attention to aspects or associates of the product/brand.
The specifics are technical and beyond the scope of this column but they have been empirically supported and they work. And the studies can be conducted online, with large numbers of people to examine the outcomes for different segments of the population.
To summarize
The mere exposure effect shows that repetition of an experience (e.g., ad, brand, product) increases liking and preference for that experience. This effect is stronger when the experience occurs out of our conscious awareness.
This means that recall is not an optimal measure of an ad’s effectiveness. It also means that product placement is likely to be effective, especially when it is done subtly. And, finally, repetition of product/brand in an ad is a powerful strategy, not because it increases recall, but because it increases the fluency that underlies the mere exposure effect.
Weinberger is a founding partner of Implicit Strategies, a market research company that measures consumers’ unconscious responses to advertising and brands. He is also a clinical, personality and motivation psychologist and a professor at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University in New York.
