Use more voices to sell products in video ads

The persuasive power of a video ad can be enhanced when its spoken narration uses more voices, finds a new research paper.

Hearing different voices narrate a persuasive message grabs the attention of consumers and boosts their willingness to pay. The authors of the study called this the ‘voice numerosity effect’. This effect continues to be true even when consumers are minimally distracted. When delivering complex messages, however, the authors suggest one voice might be better than several. 

Context 

“The human voice is the most important sound in our environment but carries socially relevant information for communication,” says the study called More Voices Persuade: The Attentional Benefits of Voice Numerosity. Hearing human voices activates distinct regions in the brain, quickly drawing attention, it adds.

Why video marketing matters 

Video advertising has become increasingly prevalent and influential in consumer decision-making. For example, Google estimates that more than 90% of consumers rely on online product videos to discover new brands or products, and more than 50% use videos to decide which specific brand or product to buy.

These videos often feature one or more narrators discussing product features and benefits. For example, in an Apple video introducing AirPods Max, the voiceover has two narrators. Research from various disciplines suggests that sound—in particular the human voice—plays an important role in influencing consumer behavior. This study adds concrete evidence to that previous research. 

Takeaways

The main study focused on Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns that spanned 31 categories and accounted for almost 70% of funds raised on the platform. The researchers assessed pledged funding, number of backers and project success to draw conclusions. 

• Having more voices narrate the project message improves outcomes and this is ‘both statistically significant and economically important’—resulting in nearly $13,000 additional funds (39% increase); 118 more customers backing the project (38% increase); a 1.6% greater probability that the project will be funded (6.5% increase). 
• Having more voices narrate the project message at faster rates relates to lower project outcomes, while the benefit of an additional voice is higher for easier-to-comprehend videos than those that are more complex. 
• Videos with higher volumes raised more funding, as did those with a more dynamic track, more verbal and visual information, and those made by more experienced creators. Offering more purchase options also improved the project outcome. 
• These findings were replicated in a validation study with 300 randomly selected videos, while there were similar results when 2,449 ads on YouTube were analyzed.
• In a low distraction setting, participants’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the product was greater after watching a video with five voices rather than a single voice. 
• When highly distracted, however, their WTP was comparable, irrespective of the number of voices. 

About the study 

To gain insights into current practice, the authors interviewed five senior executives (two from global ad agencies and three from global FMCG businesses), who revealed that video narration with a single voice or with multiple voices is common in practice but employed in a non-strategic manner.

Four studies (plus validation and replication studies)—including two large-scale, real-world datasets (with more than 11,000 crowdfunding videos and over 3.6 million customer transactions, and more than 1,600 video ads) and two controlled experiments with over 1,800 participants. Some of the experiments included machine learning, NLP and text mining to process the data. 

Sourced from the Journal of Marketing Research