Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

Measuring the impact of storytelling on the consumer’s brain

Research Paper • Garth Viegas, Research on WARC, July 2019

Tata Global Beverages, the Indian drinks giant, investigated the impact of story-telling when used in television commercials.

Unilever tackles marketing bias with DNA tests

News • 11 July 2019

Unilever, the consumer goods manufacturer, found an innovative way to challenge stereotypes by asking several of its marketers, as well as agency representatives, to take DNA tests and explore their own genetic heritage.

Selling Creative Research Short? How creative research can help measure and fuel long-term campaign effects

Research Paper • Adam Sheridan, Research on WARC, Ipsos Views

Campaigns using creative evaluation services are less likely to achieve long-term effects, so marketers need to better apply these metrics in their creative development process to improve the chance of achieving long term business effects.

Be bold, be creative, do research! How early communication research enables marketers to make more creative, bolder advertising... faster

Research Paper • Arnaud Debia, Research on WARC, Ipsos Game Changers

Strong ideas are essential for advertisers to grab attention and grow powerful brands, but this requires making bolder creative choices – which can turn around a category, yet risks making a wrong turn.

Unilever aims to remove stereotypes from its marketing DNA

Article • Stephen Whiteside, Event Reports, Cannes Lions, June 2019

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, undertook an innovative experiment in a bid to help its marketers and agencies reduce their use of stereotypes.

Effects of face images and face pareidolia on consumers? Responses to print advertising: An empirical investigation

Research Paper • Gianluigi Guido, Marco Pichierri, Giovanni Pino, and Rajan Nataraajan, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2019, pp. 219-231

This research investigates whether print advertisements featuring faces (i.e., face advertisements) or facelike images (i.e., pareidolian advertisements) better capture consumer attention than advertisements that do not include such elements.

How to use audio to build rapport and drive action

Article • Brooke Hemphill, Event Reports, Mumbrella Audioland, May 2019

By optimising their creative approach, brands can improve the effectiveness of audio ad campaigns.

How consumers view ad creativity

News • 31 May 2019

Consumers and industry professionals rate advertising creativity in different ways, with potentially significant impacts on the power of these messages, according to a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Maltesers, BT Sport & Lloyds: Why big brands are bringing diversity to advertising

Opinion • Raafi Alidina, May 2019

Portraying diversity and inclusion in ads is a good thing, says Raafi Alidina, a consultant at Frost Included, but it’s not something to be ‘done on the side’.

The possibilities of neuro-creative

News • 07 May 2019

Creative decisions require leaps into the unknown – it is impossible to analyse your way to a brilliant idea – but the greater accessibility of neuroscience testing techniques means that optimising for effectiveness has never been ...

Is advertising art or science?

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, WARC Exclusive, May 2019

Neuroscience insights are becoming ever more accessible, and are quicker to find than ever before: here are three examples of brands and agencies deploying these techniques effectively.

Quantifying the advertising-creativity assessments of consumers versus advertising professionals: Does it matter whom you ask?

Research Paper • Erik Modig and Micael Dahlen, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, March 2019

Research has shown the importance of advertising professionals' creativity assessments in achieving desired consumer responses.

The Behavioural Scientist’s guide to fuelling creativity

Article • Crawford Hollingworth and Liz Barker, Research on WARC, 2019

Provides a guide for how to build more creative environments or brainstorming sessions that maximise creativity, breadth and quality of ideas.

Are consumers eating their feelings? How memory and emotion create stronger brand connections

Article • Amy Shea and Emily Higgins, WARC Webinars, February 2019

Amy Shea, director of brand experience at Ameritest, and Emily Higgins, vice president of client services at Ameritest, discuss how marketers can build emotion and drive choice in their categories.

Can your advertisement go abstract without affecting willingness to pay? Product-centered versus lifestyle content in luxury brand print advertisements

Research Paper • Francesco Massara, Daniele Scarpi, and Daniele Porcheddu, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, February 2019

Advertising can focus on concrete product attributes or on lifestyle expressions and abstract benefits.

Best measures of attention to creative tactics in TV advertising: When do attention-getting devices capture or reduce attention?

Research Paper • Steven Bellman, Magda Nenycz-Thiel, Rachel Kennedy, Nicole Hartnett, and Duane Varan, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, January 2019

Attracting attention is a common goal for advertisers, but there is limited knowledge about how best to measure attention.

Motives and alibis: How to rethink messaging for unignorable communications

Opinion • Mike Teasdale, January 2019

Neuroscience teaches us that memories don’t exist whole but as little bytes of sensory impulses that need reconstruction.

Google: The battle of the campaign effectiveness methodologies: can two diverse approaches deliver one truth?

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Media Research, 2018

Google, a multinational technology company, created two studies that delivered empirical findings to uncover the effectiveness of an offline campaign in France.

Campaign Tracking Comes of Age: delivering continuous creative enhancement for Officeworks

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, Jeremy Bullmore Award for Creative Development Research, 2018

Officeworks, a chain of office supply stores, used innovative monthly campaign tracking – often cast as an ogre, crushing creativity – to underpin a process of continuous refinement and improvement in ad-effectiveness in Australia.

The AA: Sparkplugs to Singalongs

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, Jeremy Bullmore Award for Creative Development Research, 2018

The AA, British motoring association, turned around a decade of decline by re-introducing emotional brand building as part of a complete marketing overhaul.

Brainy Bar 7: Can you have too much emotional advertising?

Opinion • Sam Peña-Taylor, November 2018

Emotional advertising is in vogue right now. But how much do we need to do and how much is too much? WARC was at Brainy Bar 7 to hear.

How do I use creativity to drive effectiveness?

Article • WARC Evidence, October 2018

Details how marketers should be using creativity to drive effectiveness by looking at studies that prove the link between the two and advising on successful creative strategy.

Can media neutrality limit creative potential? How advertising’s use of ideation templates fares across media

Research Paper • Alexander Tevi, Scott Koslow, and John Parker, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, October 2018

This article approaches the question of media neutrality by investigating whether ideation techniques such as templates produce the same quality of advertisements across media.

Is data-driven creative the future of video content?

News • 21 September 2018

Google is placing its bets on the future of data-driven video in Australia, according to two senior executives at the company.

British Gas and ‘the Wilbur effect’

Article • Matthew Carlton, Event Reports, Media Research Summit, June 2018

Looks at an example of the use of eye-tracking to assess whether people are looking at online ads.

Creativity & research