How does creativity impact the effectiveness of out-of-home advertising?

Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising is a powerful tool for business since it first appeared thousands of years ago. However, even in the most recent years, it has been very little “explored”, despite its great effectiveness. In this study, we researched in which ways an OOH advertisement can have the most impact on consumers through the use of four different creative elements: the use of colour, the use of text, the depiction of people and the depiction of the product. Some of the findings validated the existing literature, such as that attention has a significant positive impact on brand recall. Some were really surprising, such as the depiction of the product being the only element that has both direct and indirect positive effects on brand recall. But even still, all of the four creative elements can be of great value for marketers in the future, as it will be more analytically presented below.

By Chryssa Alevizou (University of Groningen) and Lisette Kruizinga – de Vries (DVJ Insights)

OOH ADVERTISING

Out-Of-Home (OOH) remains one of the oldest and most prominent forms of advertising. Understanding how to increase its effectiveness through different creative elements can really differentiate a brand from the arising competition in the industry. As today´s average consumer is bombarded with thousands of advertising messages in every form imaginable, the constant battle of each firm is to be the one that prevails in their memory, breaking through the advertising clutter (Elliott & Speck 1998). To do that, companies need to develop strategies that would both attract attention and lower resistance to the ad. Surprisingly, the existing literature about the effectiveness of different aspects of creativity in an out-of-home setting is limited as well as its link between exposure time and consumer perception. To be more specific, OOH advertising is examined in only 2% of the research published in major journals over the span of the last decades (Khang et al., 2016), making it one of the least frequently investigated types of media.

CREATIVITY IS KEY

Creativity is key in realising ad effectiveness. Several studies support this, as Mark Ritson found that next to the brand size, creative execution is the most important element to drive marketing effectiveness (see Figure 1). Moreover, creatively awarded campaigns are 11x more efficient in driving Share of Market growth (Binet & Field). And based upon DVJ Insights’ meta-analyses relating GRP (Gross Rating Point) levels with in-market recognition, we have found that the difference between poor and top performing creative is around 150-200 GRPs. In other words, creatively strong ads need fewer GRPs to generate the same impact as creatively weak ads.

Figure 1: Top 10 list factors determining advertising effectiveness (Mark Ritson, WARC 2020)

Creativity is a broad term that can be measured through several different dimensions. In a meta-analysis on advertising creativity conducted by Rosengren and her colleagues in 2020, it was indicated that in terms of recall, recognition, and attitude towards the ad, creative advertising is typically more effective than non-creative advertising. Furthermore, creative advertisements tend to be more memorable too. However, these findings highly depend on a variety of variables, such as the level of originality, the product market, the media environment, etc. Therefore, and because of the limited research on OOH ads, this study focuses on four specific creative elements of OOH ads and how they relate to the effectiveness of those ads. Specifically, we approach creativity by examining four main aspects of it that are commonly found in OOH advertising campaigns: the use of colour, the use of text, the depiction of people and the depiction of the product. The effectiveness of those creative elements is measured by both the direct effect they have on brand recall, but also by the indirect effect they have through attention.

ATTENTION AND BRAND RECALL

How do we eventually make our (buying) decisions? According to Kahneman, our brain has two main ways to process information: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is characterized as “thinking fast”, whereas System 2 is “thinking slow”. The former is subconscious and operates effortlessly and jumps to conclusions regarding causality. On the other hand, System 2 regards reasoning and takes effort to make calculated decisions. As our brain is responsible for all our (consumer) behaviour, to conserve energy, it tends to drop information on the process (Renvoisé & Morin 2007). As a result, only a limited amount of information can reach peoples’ short-term memory. Therefore, those are the only elements that can also be recalled when System 2 is activated.

Both of those systems and their effectiveness are based on heuristics that can be found in our environment, such as the simpleness or the vividness of the advertised message. Summarizing, advertising regardless of the media being employed requires attention, which heavily influences its effectiveness (Nilsson 2006). In this study, we want to examine both attention (System 1), meaning how quickly the ad can grab consumers’ attention, and recollection (System 2), regarding the ability of the ads to be recalled afterwards, through the lenses of the four creative elements.

STUDY SET-UP

The respondents of the study came from three countries: the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany. All the data were conducted through DVJ’s pre-testing tools, which included 36 different advertisements for the Netherlands’ survey, and 24 for Germany and the UK respectively, and they were manually “blended” into 14 different OOH environments for each country (7 portraits and 7 landscapes). The questionnaire measured respondents’ attention to the ads, whether they were able to recall both the advertised brand and message, which elements (colour, text, people, product) stuck out to them the most (eventually increasing the advertisement’s effectiveness), what associations they made in their minds and eventually the evaluation of the ad in general.

FINDINGS

As we are interested in whether the use of colour, the use of text, the depiction of people and the depiction of the product have an effect on brand recall, which is mediated by attention, we estimated a mediation model. The results can be found in Table 1.

Table 1: Parameter estimates for the mediation model on Attention and Brand Recall

Overall, the results indicate that all four elements (colour, people, product, and text) have a positive significant impact on brand recall with the product having the largest effect (β=.065). The depiction of the product has a significant indirect effect on attention as well, whereas the other three elements do not go through attention. These findings also relate to the fact the depiction of the product is also the element that the participants noticed first in the ads, followed by the text. Moreover, attention does have a significant and positive relationship with brand recall. From these results, we can conclude that the depiction of the product is the most effective creative element that can be used in Out-of-Home advertisements.

MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

These results are useful for marketers and creators of Out-of-Home advertisements. For example, by realizing the great potential and impact that the depiction of a product has in an OOH advertisement, they can use products in their ads. Moreover, even if the depiction of the product turned out to be the most effective creative element, it doesn’t mean that the other three cannot or should not successfully be used as well. Since they all are impacting brand recall, they can be used to highlight specific aspects of the ad that the company wants the consumer to remember, such as the use of text for the brand slogan. Also, in cases where an OOH ad contains a more complex message, with the right utilisation of creativity, the consumer will be able to not only pay attention to it but also process and recall it later as well.

REFERENCES

Elliott, M.T., & Speck, P.S. (1998), “Consumer perceptions of advertising clutter and its impact across various media”, Journal of Advertising Research, 38 (1), 29-30
Kahneman, D. (2012), Thinking fast and slow. Penguin Books Ltd.
Khang, H, Hanb, S., Shinc, S., Kim, M.J. (2016), “A retrospective on the state of international advertising research in advertising, communication, and marketing journals: 1963-2014”, International Journal of Advertising, 35 (3), 540-568.
Nilsson, C.P. (2006), Attention to Advertising. Doctoral thesis. Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, Sweden.
Renvoisé, P. & Morin, C. (2007), Neuromarketing: Understanding the “buy button” in your customer’s brain. HarperCollins Leadership.
Rosengren S., Eisend M., Koslow S., and Dahlen M. (2020), “A Meta-Analysis of When and How Advertising Creativity Works”, Journal of Marketing, 84 (6), 39-56.

NOTES

This is a summary based on the master thesis of Chryssa Alevizou, which she wrote in cooperation with DVJ Insights.