Ad Engagement And The Psychology Of Stickiness

Cameron Hulett, Undertone, executive director, explains his opinion on how data shows that it's best to keep it simple when coming up with campaign creatives, especially with online audiences, which are notoriously promiscuous.  

In the 1970’s the TV show ‘Sesame Street’ was born. It was an educational sensation not only because it transformed the way children learnt, but because it was one of the true pioneers of deeply analysing viewer behaviour in order to adjust content.

The head of research, Ed Palmer, was a psychologist from Oregon who specialised in television as an educational tool. His main job was to find out if the show actually grabbed the attention of the viewers. One of the definitive experiments he undertook was what I would call a 'stickiness test'.

The stickiness test was simple: He would play the TV show on a screen, and alongside it he would also run a slide show that flashed up random, but highly distracting, images every seven seconds. Then he would monitor the eye movement of the audience to see how distracted they were by the slide images. Every time the slide changed, Palmer would record which segment of the show was being watched and whether the viewer was distracted by the slide show or not. He then analysed the data from numerous angles.

The insights of Palmer’s research were astounding, and most can be directly related back to modern day advertising.

One key insight relates to advert complexity. What Palmer found was the audience got highly distracted if there was any form of confusion, overload or contention. That meant that instead of picking up on the signal that something exciting was going on – which was the intention of the TV producer – the audience read it as confusing and lost interest in the content.

So too with digital adverts today. Because of the measurability of the internet, we have measured time and again the correlation between over-complex ads and low engagement rates. In other words, if you try to cram too much into one ad, your internet audience simply loses interest at the beginning of the ad and moves on. Added to this, remember that the internet allows your audience to move off with such speed that you don’t even get a look in. That means your ad is a flop, irrespective of who sees it!

This is particularly prevalent with high impact ads, where marketers see the large canvas they can paint on and request us to build all singing all dancing ads.

What they really need to do is focus on the one theme that will grab and hold the visitor’s attention. And the visitor’s attention span online is so short, that if they sense the ad is complex and may take any significant thought to process, they move off before the ad can engage.

This means that if the marketer wants to get more than one message across, then it’s best advised to have multiple independent campaigns working in unison with a current theme

We have seen this especially the case where the marketer is looking to drive its customers down a conversion funnel from awareness to action. Applying multiple creative each with a specific focus has shown to increase conversion rates of the final ad by five times.

This is nothing but amazing. And furthermore, this modern day 'stickiness test' has an extra advantage – you can optimise your campaign along the way by doing A/B testing in a live environment.

So every time you build an ad, get into the mindset of your audience and think ‘stickiness’.  It drives results.