Are really annoying ads really effective ads?

The marketing philosophy of Hayley Parsons who heads up Go Compare the insurance comparison website makes for an interesting debate.

Talking about their TV ads, featuring the large moustachioed opera singer Gio Compario, she says “the brief was to make them as irritating as possible. I didn’t want to win any awards for creativity. Annoying ads really work”.

Her premise is that the tune sticks in your head until it hurts so that when people think insurance, they think Go Compare. As far as Parsons is concerned “It doesn’t matter that they don’t like us”. Despite being voted the UKs most annoying advertiser, Go Compare has grown to be worth a reputed £400m in the 5 years since its inception.

Another infuriating example is the Michael Winner esure ads, famous for their "Calm down, dear, it's just a commercial" catchphrase repetition of the same joke in different guises. Winner revealed they might never have been made as Greg Delaney whose agency ran the account said of the original concept: “This is the worst commercial I've ever heard in my life. We don't want anything to do with it” and promptly resigned the account in disgust. Yet when the adverts were launched in 2002, esure had to take on 600 extra staff to cope with the volume of phone calls.

So does the claimed success of these ads in driving up sales give credence to the notion that ads don’t have to be liked to be effective?

Well the short answer is both yes and no…

Yes in that they do get attention, even if it’s negative.

Behavioural Economics thinking demonstrates that you don’t need to change attitudes to effect a change in behaviour - which is fine given research shows the strength of advertising lies less in persuading people to change their attitudes and more in acting as a reminder to reinforce current behaviour.

Expanding on this, Sutherland & Sylvester point out in their excellent book ‘Advertising and the mind of the consumer’ there are also two different mental processes at work in choice decisions: ‘Weighing up of alternatives is one, but more importantly is which alternatives get weighed up’.

In other words to be considered, a brand must first get itself onto a consumers mental checklist. So salience is the name of the game as the primary importance of any ad is to drive top of mind brand recall at the point of consideration. The strength of salience determines the mental order in which alternatives are considered. So the higher up a brand sits on a consumer’s mental checklist the better the probability of it being considered and purchased before the competition so long as the offer and experience is better or comparable to the competition.

This means in a cluttered relatively undifferentiated marketplace like insurance, getting your name firmly into people’s heads appears to be sufficient. So although Go Compare ads are extremely annoying, it appear s they don’t act as a barrier to purchase as they help remind people at the right point in time and encourage purchase.

So does this mean t it is better to be hated if it gets you attention?

No – creativity has an important role to play

The above question raises an interesting point. Strategically it can be good to be hated in helping focus and strengthen bonds with a specific type of consumer such as the case with Marmite. Likewise with advertising it is arguably better to be hated than ignored which is the fate suffered by the vast majority of advertising so long as you don’t alienate the people you are targeting.

Ads can be ignored for many reasons – not relevant, too bland, too boring, too me-too etc. To work, ads need to spark a reaction whether this is good or bad. However ads which set out to irritate and annoy don’t respect the consumer and as with real-life personal relationships, this doesn’t provide a solid foundation for building a strong positive bond.

Previous research by the Advertising Research Foundation established that ‘advertising liking was the strongest factor linked to sales’

As Roger Dooley, author of Neuromarketing puts it “At the cognitive level, I find myself repelled by an advertiser bold enough to acknowledge that their ads are annoying me, and then continue to assault me with the objectionable elements in the same ad.” He goes onto say, “The real danger, though, doesn’t really involve conscious processing by the viewers. If viewers begin to associate the brand or packaging with the negative emotion of a loud and annoying interruption of their entertainment, eventually the brand will suffer.”

And returning to Sutherland & Sylvester who say that ‘a brand’s advertising reflects a dimension of its personality, and therefore critical to making people feel good about the brand. Ads that are liked have a higher probability of being effective…and can be the feather that tips the balance towards that brand if all other things in the market are equal’.

In summary

It is true that irritating ads can be effective at driving recall and brand consideration especially when aligned to significant marketing spend to repeatedly hammer home their messages.
Also it is true that likeability is somewhat less important for high involvement products such as cars which have a more complex decision making process. This is especially true of humour which can be seen as superfluous in attracting attention if it distracts from the key sought after message elements.

However it is important for low interest relatively undifferentiated categories such as car insurance where the purchase decision making process tends to be more functional and value-driven. This is where a good creative strategy can help capture people’s attention, interest and imagination in a way that doesn’t annoy or irritate.

And in a digital world where people can choose to block out ads that irritate and where positive word of mouth is increasingly important to a brands success aiming creatively higher will help drive salience. This is because a brand's advertising attire can make a brand more attractive and be the essential difference when everything else is equal.

So to win out in the longer term I’d suggest it’s not a case of shouting loud, but thinking smart.

What do you think?

Gaze control – the look of things to come?

A Swedish company, Tobii Technology, has invented a prototype laptop that can carry out 100 or so simple commands by using your eyes in what the makers call ‘gaze control’.

Recently showcased at the CeBit technology fair earlier this month in Hanover, the technology works by reflecting infrared light off your corneas, enabling inbuilt sensors to detect to within a few millimetres where your eyes are looking at. To activate gaze control you have to hold down the Alt key so not to inadvertently activate wayward looks or movements. For example it can follow your gaze to automatically scroll down a document that’s being read or open and select from drop down menus or carry out other previously mouse activated commands such as opening bookmarks.

While eye-tracking capabilities have been around for a while, this is the first time it has been installed in a consumer friendly computer. Still in the early stages of development further refinement is required in terms of design, performance and production at an affordable cost.

While it is intended to remove up to 80% of the times you need to click, the makers say it is intended to supplement rather than supplant the mouse or keyboard to speed up and make easier a range of common tasks.

Given the advent of gesture activated devices such as the Xbox Kinect and the continued development of voice activated software beyond the world of HAL to ease inputting content through dictation, I wonder how long it will be before look, gesture and voice interface technologies converge to provide even richer more time efficient digital applications and experiences?

For digital agencies, the challenge will be in how to best harness this to the benefit of brands, businesses and end users through evolving, inventing and blending their skillsets and intellectual know-how.

Just in the same way that giving a film the 3D treatment doesn’t automatically make for a better film, both intelligent application and a good plot is essential. After all sizzle by itself cannot make up for an unsavoury sausage.