Rotterdam - October 29, 2008. The saying in advertising that there is power in repeating does not seem to count for much in the amount of brand notifications in a commercial. Elaborate European research performed by MetrixLab shows that mentioning a brand more often influences people’s channel-switching behavior, but after a certain number of brand notifications, the brand awareness does not increase further. Furthermore, the research shows that a visual brand notification performs considerably better compared to an auditory brand notification.

The challenge for TV commercials to have an impact that lasts longer becomes greater and greater under the increasing media pressure. The question that remains is how commercials should be structured in order to achieve the desired effects.

In collaboration with the University of Nijmegen, MetrixLab conducted an elaborate study in which over 600 commercials were measured in 11 European countries with more than 60.000 observations to discover this structure. The conclusions from this study contradict some of the ways art/creative directors and advertisers are used to working.

Visual brand notifications have a larger impact than auditory brand expressions.
Every marketer asks himself/herself the same question. In what way should I present my brand in the commercial (visually or spoken)? In order to discover the best form of notification, all brand expressions in over 600 commercials were coded and investigated by MetrixLab. Subsequently, the effects of these commercials in terms of spontaneous and aided brand awareness resulting from these commercials were compared. The outcomes of this study are presented in the figure below.

The figure shows that a visual brand expression has significantly more impact on brand awareness. Showing instead of mentioning a brand results in a 20% increase in spontaneous brand awareness!

Limit to the amount of brand expressions
The second question that arises is how many times a brand or brand symbol should be shown or mentioned. In order to answer this question, all brand expressions in the data file of over 600 commercials were counted. The results from these analyses are presented in the table below. Next to the memory effects that result from a commercial, the effect of the amount of brand expressions on the “channel-switching chance” of a commercial was also investigated.

As might be expected, more brand expressions in a commercial lead to a higher recall of the brand and better memory effects. However, the optimum is soon reached. Two times is clearly better than once, but after four times, there is no additional effect visible. Nevertheless, we see that the more times a brand may be shown, the greater the chance becomes that people switch channels.

A commercial needs branding, but not too often and rather through visually than only oral communication. This approach requires the necessary creativity instead of the good old saying, “the more, the better.”

Martijn van Lambalgen (Senior Research Manager MetrixLab) states, "The elaborate database of MetrixLab makes it possible for the first time to draw some hard conclusions about the way brands are used in commercials. 'The more, the better' does not seem to apply for brand expressions in commercials and is often only distracting from the storyline. Based on these findings, we can advise advertisers more appropriately. I hope that they will not automatically increase the amount of brand expressions when there is a lack of brand effect."

About MetrixLab
MetrixLab specializes in communication and innovation research through the Internet – in other words "online market research" – and was rewarded with the "Agency of the Year" award by MOA. The most important reason for this success is the continuous innovation that is brought into their research. Customers of MetrixLab include Canon, Philips, Siemens, Unilever, Aegon, TomTom, ANWB, Microsoft Advertising and more.

Authors:
Martijn van Lambalgen, Lucas Hulsebos
Media & Advertising, MetrixLab