INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Google Unskippable Labs team has been testing ad effectiveness in a compelling new way: It created a fake pizza brand called Doctor Fork,
used stock footage to create 33 ads and then served them up on YouTube and reached 20 million impressions.
Ben Jones, creative director at
Unskippable Labs, explained that there are certain axioms among advertisers that are never really put to the test
For example: &You can''t show somebody chewing food and looking at the camera.
If everyone sees this as an obvious ''third rail,& then no
one puts it in their ads, so there no testing to see if chewing and looking at the camera is really a problem
By creating a fake pizza brand, Jones said his team suddenly had &a very different kind of freedom to be wrong.
Maybe I can''t look directly
at the camera, but Doctor Fork can do whatever he wants,& Jones said
&Let use the freedom of the unbranded ad to be wrong, to push in directions and ask questions that a brand will not, because a brand has a
complex brief and very focused set of objectives.
Plus, YouTube provided Jones and his team with an enormous number of real eyeballs to
test out their ideas, rather than limiting them to a small focus group.
This initial experiment was developed in partnership with Nestle
andRyan Elder, an associate professor of marketing at Brigham Young University
The Doctor Fork ads were created to answer questions in two broad categories: the effect of sensory cues on ad effectiveness (an area where
Elder has done research) and man versus food, i.e
how much human presence there should be in food ads.
As for what they learned, here how Google summarized the findings:
1
Immersive, multi-sensory experiences drive better recall than single sensory experiences.
Implications: Food ads should stimulate the full
range of senses and use the full potential of audio, visual and text cues to do so.
2
Separating visual input from text (voice and supers) increases both recall and favorability.
Implications: Brands making short-form ads
should consider separating visual clips from audio/supers for maximum impact.
3
Explicit instruction to imagine increases both recall and favorability.
Implications: Brands should use instruction to drive impact until
they can prove more effective options.
4
We want edge-to-edge food in our food ads.
Implications: Food ads should include super close shots of the food to drive favorability and
Bite and smile is not the only way to show a pleasurable food experience.
Implications: A range of human/food approaches are equally valid
Brands should feel there is freedom in how they present their food being enjoyed, not constrained by bite-and-smile.
6
Younger audiences responded better to first-person perspectives (POV) than older audiences did
It is increasingly rare that academic research actually makes its way into practice, or when it does, it a little too late to make an
&Similarly, many times academics focus more on the theoretical rather than practical consequences of their research, limiting its impact
This collaboration with Google created a unique environment where creative development in advertising could be informed by academic theory,
tested in the real world, and immediately disseminated to companies to use
The findings from the large scale YouTube experiments led to very fruitful brainstorming with the agencies and brand teams.
Meanwhile, Jones
said his team will be applying this methodology to investigate other questions, like the ways that various audience interests and affinities
Or as he put it, &How can we say, ‘Here is an audience that has some commonality that makes my ad more effective besides the year they
