The real danger of wear-out: stopping too early

Blog Jori van de Spijker – Practice Lead Brand & Comms

“Is our commercial experiencing wear-out?” is a question I come across often. The threat of wear-out is something that concerns marketers. And rightly so, nobody wants to spend their budget on an advertisement that only causes irritation for the consumer. But due to this focus on wear-out, a bigger problem often remains undiscussed. Where marketers are afraid that the advertisement will be on TV for too long, we see in practice that advertisements are often stopped too early, before they have reached their level of maximum impact.

The stages of wear-out

Firstly, let’s look at the different stages of wear-out. In the first stage the viewer loses his or her attention, they have seen the commercial a couple of times now and think they know what it’s about. The second phase is the decline in learning effects. The viewer or listener doesn’t learn anything new from the commercial and now knows the message. The third stage is what everyone always thinks of when it comes to wear-out: people have seen it so often; they start to find it annoying. However, this doesn’t occur all that often.

Wear-out in practice

So, how often do we stumble across this phenomenon? In our campaign effect measurement, we can determine how often someone has been in contact with the commercial, and make a comparison to those who have seen the commercial often, and those who haven’t. As it turned out: wear-out only occurred in less than 5% of cases. In only 3% did irritation increase and the extent to which a commercial was liked, decrease. What we didn’t expect to happen but is somewhat logical, is that the exact opposite occurred. The contact group that had seen the commercial more often, liked it more. In the first stage of wear-in, people like the commercial more, they learn more about it and understand it better. Then we have the neutral stage where evaluation neither increases nor decreases. And it’s only after this stage that we come to wear-out. The study revealed that in 15% of cases the commercial was pulled off the air whilst still being in the wear-in stage.

And I can imagine why. The client sees and hears the commercial continuously in his or her work. They have gone through the entire creative process. When the commercial finally comes on the tv, they have watched it tons of times already. As a result, they are greatly influenced, and overestimate the extent to which regular consumers experience the commercial.

So, how does wear-in work?

You can compare wear-in to the first time you hear a new song. You might not love it at first and have to get used to it. When you’re in the car and the radio plays that song again, you start to like it more and more. Things you recognise and are therefore easier to process in your brain, we tend to like more. In the academic world this is called the Mere-exposure effect: a phenomenon where people develop a preference for things just because they have been in contact with it. Another psychological concept related to this is Processing Fluency; research shows that we like things more depending on how we can process them more easily in the brain. That’s why we like watching movies more often, listen to a song more often and like advertisements more when we’ve seen them more often.

A fun discussion

All these things make the wear-out discussion interesting. Based on a campaign effect study, we can very well determine in which stage an advertisement finds itself. More often than wear-out, we learn that an expression is still in the wear-in phase and that it is advisable to use it more often in a subsequent campaign. That is why it is good for clients to monitor this. Instead of wondering if a commercial isn’t on TV for too long, we better ask ourselves if we aren’t pulling it off the air too soon. After all, your favourite film has definitely made an appearance more than once.