COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Are advertisers too clever for their own good? That's the implication from researchers at the University of Maryland and Tilburg University in The Netherlands. In a world of distracted consumers and rapid-fire media — and particularly in the hectic online environment — simplicity might be the best strategy.
One theory in advertising suggests that consumers are turned off by simple messages. For their attention to be grabbed and held, they need nuance or wit. But the way many ads are received today — a billboard that passes in a flash, the online ad you catch out of the corner of your eye — advertisers should be designing them to convey information in timeframes as short as one-tenth of a second, says Michel Wedel, a marketing professor at UMD’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
"A lot of advertising is being tested over fairly long exposures — several seconds, or even 10 to 20 seconds," says Wedel. "The problem is that ads that do well in that scenario may not do well in short exposures." Complexity especially does not pay off online, Wedel says, where eye tracking research shows that people actively try to avoid ads. But billboards and even many print ads are often taken in with a glimpse, too.
Micro-glances
Wedel has shown that 100 milliseconds is enough time for consumers to grasp the gist of an ad — if it is clear and "typical" (a car ad that shows a car front and center, say). In the new study, Wedel, Tilburg’s Rik Pieters and Millie Elsen (senior analyst at CentERdata) amplify this finding by looking at how people respond to three kinds of ads: "upfront ads" (typical, obvious ads, usually showing the product), "mystery ads" (which require decoding), and "false front ads" (which appear at first to advertise one product but in fact advertise another, such as a photo of a blonde woman intended to sell wheat beer).
The authors tested the three types of ads in three experiments, both in labs and online, involving a total of 1,360 test subjects and 50 advertisements.
Don't dupe people
Upfront ads were the best bet, the study finds. People grasped them after 100 milliseconds, rated them highly, and continued to like them over longer stretches. Test subjects liked mystery ads, too, after several seconds. But if they saw them for only 100 milliseconds they didn't understand them. False front ads — this would include "sponsored content" ads posing as news articles — confused people over short periods and irritated them over longer ones. No upside.
"Mystery ads," whose visual complexity requires work on the part of the viewer to decode, are viewed less positively than upfront ads in the initial glimpse, but they gain in approval over time, reaching similar levels. One example in the study showed a ninja severing a rope holding a refrigerator, which was about to crush apples to create juice.
An underused approach
Wedel and his co-authors looked at recent prize-winning ads and found that only 15 percent were upfront.
The study, "Thin Slice Impressions: How Advertising Evaluation Depends on Exposure Duration," has been accepted at the Journal of Marketing Research.