Today in Digital Marketing - Tuning In the Right Frequency

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, May 13th. Today, a special Deep Dive Marketing Science episode. In the last couple of weeks, many people who are listening to us on the free podcast feed reached out to us. They said, enough with the ads already. They're the same ones over and over again. Just stop. We get it. But are they actually doing our brand harm? What about for our most loyal listeners? Are the ads ever too repetitive for them? For an answer to that question,

Starting point is 00:00:34 we called up Nelson Amaral. He is an associate professor of marketing at Ontario Tech University. He is co-author of the recently published scientific study called Battle of the Brand. Does brand attachment inoculate against the negative effects of ad repetition? Dr. Amaral joins me from his office in Toronto. Hello. Hi, how are you, Todd? I'm well. So how badly did we mess up our brand with these repetitive ads? So it depends on who it is that's listening to the ads. The reason this project was born in the first place was a personal experience. I was a PhD student, which meant I was really, really poor, but I had kids.

Starting point is 00:01:13 And I knew that what we were going to do to treat ourselves and our kids, who were also put through the ringer by having their dad in a PhD program, was we were going to take them to Disney World, which is like the classic thing you do when you accomplish something, right? I think I must have been searching for Disney World and there must have been cookies on my laptop for Disney World because this is in Minneapolis. I did my PhD at the University of Minnesota. And the reason I'm saying that is because I was watching Hulu, which Canadians may not be that familiar with, but it's a streaming service in the US. I think it's still, it was the biggest before Netflix and Disney took over, but people still use Hulu. So the way the Hulu model works is that you can watch all kinds of programs for free,

Starting point is 00:01:54 as long as you agree to be interrupted, which is what Amazon Prime is now doing to people. And I think it's the trend that they're all moving in this direction. So what I noticed was I saw the same ad during every commercial break. It was for Disney World in Florida. And what struck me was, why am I not getting annoyed by this? Or am I not getting more annoyed by this? That was the question. And that's what started this research. Turns out the answer to that question is, well, every time I saw the ad, it made me feel good because it reminded me I'm going to take my kids to Disney World. It's a year or two away. But every time I saw that ad, this connection that I had with that brand because of the anticipated joy of that trip, it helped me overcome the negative thoughts, which I did have, of why do

Starting point is 00:02:47 they keep showing me this ad over and over again? This is really supposed to be annoying, but for some reason, it's not as annoying as it should be. So that's the whole reason that this project started. It was that personal experience. And tell me what you discovered from your research. It was, I guess, the closer a connection someone has to the brand, the more tolerant they are of repetitive ads. Yeah, it's a relationship that you have with the brand. So what we found was it's personal. I think that's the best way to put it.

Starting point is 00:03:19 There's been a lot of research that's looked at the symbolic value of brands. Everybody in marketing is aware of the power that brands have because of the social symbolic power they have, right? Like I wear Nike because then people are going to think I'm athletic or I use a Mac because then people are going to think that I've got a little bit of extra money and I like to do creative work. So everybody knows about that part of branding. What I was interested in was my personal experience with Disney. So what if you're a big fan of BMW,

Starting point is 00:03:53 which is the example I start with in my paper, and you see the same BMW over and over again, or better yet, you may have listeners who actually search out ads on YouTube for some of their favorite brands. So not only are they having companies show them these brands over and over again, but they're actually going out and searching. It's kind of weird. We all hate being exposed to the same ads over and over, but there are people who actually go on YouTube to look at ads for these companies they love, these brands they love, right?

Starting point is 00:04:21 Those are the people that I was interested in studying. These people with a really strong attachment to a brand. Could you expose those people to a brand advertisement over and over and over, even if it's the same ad, and not see what has been well established by researchers and practitioners over about 40 or 50 years, this phenomenon called brand wear out, which is that when you see a brand advertised about between two and five times, there's initially an improvement in your attachment to the brand and your perception of the products that it makes and the services because you're learning about it and you're becoming a little bit more interested in it. But then after a while, you're like,

Starting point is 00:05:07 okay, I get it. I don't want to see this again. And that's where you have wear out. So it depends on the ad. If they're funny, you can put up with it for longer. If they're emotional, maybe you can put up with it longer. Brands that create really dry ads, you're going to have wear out after two times. So there are other factors that play into how long it takes before you start getting annoyed. But eventually everybody gets annoyed. I want that number, though, because there's been other research, of course, on ad frequency. Some studies have found that high frequency helps people remember the message. There's some research that has found that repetition can make a claim more believable.

Starting point is 00:05:43 But, you know, after a while, those become diminishing returns. And then they turn somewhat against them. I guess what I'm asking is, what is the number? For a super fan, or the term you used is someone with high personal brand attachment. How many ads can I get away with in repetition? When I'm looking at my meta ads manager and it's reporting a frequency number of 11 over the course of, I don't know, seven days, is that too many? Give me the magic number. Ah, I can't. In true MBA fashion, the answer is it depends. So, you know, I had said

Starting point is 00:06:19 there's all these other factors like, is the ad funny? Is it it entertaining does it have star power um is it visually appealing does it pull your heartstrings all of these things are going to affect how long it takes before you start to feel annoyed by the ad so there's no real answer to that question okay let's do that by relative then do you have a and you may not have measured this in particular if so i didn't see it in the study but let let's talk about a relative number. If an average consumer gets fed up after five ads, how many more as a relative factor does your gut tell you that super fans? But is it they can put up with two times more, five times more? OK, so that's a good question. And the answer is it still depends

Starting point is 00:07:06 because it depends on how connected I am to that brand and it depends on why I have that personal attachment. Like in my case, I literally saw the Disney ad. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said 100 times over a period of four months. You know, because you're watching Hulu like four hours a day while you're crunching some numbers. It doesn't take a lot of cognitive effort, um, for you to crunch numbers. Sometimes you're just like cleaning data, which is a big part of my job as a researcher.

Starting point is 00:07:36 And that kind of mindless effort, you get really bored. So you have stuff, you know, in the background that you're watching. And in the U S it was Hulu. So I was watching Hulu, you know, three, four hours a day, some days, and every 10 minutes there was an ad and every ad break, there's two ads. And one of those two was always Disney. So it really was close to a hundred times. And I got annoyed of the song, but I didn't get annoyed of the ad. Like even after a hundred times there was a part of me that was like i'm going to disney world so it really depends on why you're attached

Starting point is 00:08:12 in our research the the furthest we went was 10 times so the most we showed anybody an ad was 10 times so really we're kind of limiting ourselves to streaming advertisements in the digital world. You go on Facebook and you're going to see, if you're on Facebook for two hours a day, you're going to see the same, like I just bought a car. And so you're going to see the same truck ad every time you open Facebook and every third or fourth scroll, there's an ad for a truck. So in that case, you're talking about maybe a thousand times you'll see the same ad in a month instead of 10 or 20 or 30. So our research really is limited, I think, to a context that's not digital because in the digital space, we're talking about hundreds or

Starting point is 00:08:59 thousands of repetitions, not a dozen. Do you know of any research that has looked into the effect of high frequency when a campaign is used over multiple channels? You know, the same message in a Facebook ad, as a Hulu ad, as an email marketing campaign. Are you aware of any research that looks into that? No, no. It'd be interesting to know, because that's, you know, that is certainly one of the big things that we're emerging into in this sort of brave new world of an increased reliance on first party data is we are, you know, trying to use as many of these sort of omni channel

Starting point is 00:09:31 places as we can. Yeah, it's funny that omni is getting so much attention. But in the world of marketing, most of that attention is still on distribution. There's not very much on marketing messages and the way they're you know we know some basic things that we all learn you know in our first branding course which is you know provide a consistent method use a consistent voice the kinds of things that everybody who works in marketing knows what we don't know is the question you're asking what happens if we show a slightly different ad you know we tweak it a little bit but we show it 50 times on Facebook, and then you see it 15 times on TikTok, and then you're watching Amazon Prime, and it comes up three times in your two-hour movie. What's that experience like if you then ask that customer for their opinion of that product or that service?

Starting point is 00:10:20 We have no idea what effect that's having. And we don't know if, which I think is part of your question too, which of them is more annoying, being interrupted while I watch Amazon or having to see the same damn truck ad on Facebook every 30 seconds while I'm scrolling. I enjoyed reading about one of your experiments. You basically sat students down in front of a TV and exposed them to a number of brand messages. But in order to not tip them off as to what you were actually measuring, there was some subterfuge involved. You had to use a cover story. Yeah, you have to because otherwise you'll end up with something in science. It's called a demand effect. If people start figuring out what it is that you're trying

Starting point is 00:11:02 to do, it can influence the way they answer your questions. So you've got people who want to be nice. And so they're going to try to guess what you're trying to figure out. And they're going to try to please you by giving you answers that they think you want to hear. What was your cover story? we were interested in the viewing experience of a television program, uh, because other streaming services were going to be sort of copying what Hulu does, which is funny because when we ran this,

Starting point is 00:11:32 we had no idea Netflix and Amazon and you know, that they were going to start showing ads. So that was the cover story. We didn't, we made them think we were interested in their opinions of, it was a Seinfeld episode, I think, or Friends. I can't remember what the show was, but it was one of those really popular sitcoms. And we told them that's what we were interested in.

Starting point is 00:11:52 Don't worry about the ads. They don't really have much to do with it. They're just, they're the interruption. Well, we want to know what you think of the show. And then at the end, we're like, by the way, we do want to know what you thought of the ads. You may have seen the same ad five times because we used cookies to figure out all, you know, none of it is true, but you have to provide this cover story in order to get good data. These are students, of course, they get class credit for participating in these studies. I would imagine that by fourth year or past

Starting point is 00:12:15 graduation, they're kind of onto these things. You would think so. But the nice thing is that at a business school, these kids are doing studies for human resource profs, operations, marketing, strategy, psychology. So they never get to see a pattern because they're doing research. Some of those research is really fun. Mine is kind of boring. But I've heard of professors who have them actually play video games. And then they're using eye tracking data to figure out what part of the game they're looking at to see if they saw the Coke billboard while they're driving by it on a video gamer. So I'm kind of boring. You know, you're just sitting there watching 20 minutes of Seinfeld. But they're all so different that, yeah, these,

Starting point is 00:12:57 the kids never really figure out what's going on. And I don't think they care. They're like, just give me my credit. I'm just going to finish and answer your questions and go. One of the more interesting parts of the study I found was that your paper found, your research found that repeated ad exposures are sometimes perceived by consumers as a threat to their identity. Walk me through what's happening in the brain there. So that's actually, that's the key finding from this paper. Um, because like I said, at the beginning, most of the research that we have in marketing is focused on

Starting point is 00:13:33 the social symbolic power of brands. So a brand becomes something because we know as a group that it, um, it means this, or it means that, or it symbolizes this, right? So what this research was looking at was, again, going back to my own personal story with Disney, it wasn't about what I thought people who go to Disney are like. That had nothing to do with why the ad wasn't annoying me. It wasn't because if I go to Disney, people are going to think I'm this kind of dad. It wasn't annoying me. It wasn't because if I go to Disney, people are going to think I'm this kind of dad. It wasn't that. It was that every time I saw the ad, I was reminded of a personal feeling,

Starting point is 00:14:16 an experience that I might have in the future with my kids. So that has nothing to do with an outside group or a reference group that I'm comparing myself to. It's completely individual. So when we first thought about our hypothesis, so the predictions we were going to make by this research, it was really based on my personal experience. And so that's what made this special. That's what made this research different. Essentially, what we ended up finding was if you show people that have a really strong connection or attachment is the word that we used in our research to a particular brand you show them that ad over and over again

Starting point is 00:14:49 they are going to have negative thoughts about the ad you know like i had said with the disney experience that jingle was driving me crazy because you're hearing the same like song over and over that part i didn't like but the ad overall just didn't annoy me because it kept reminding me of this future experience that I would have. So what we did is we measured people's thoughts. Now you can't go into somebody's brain. So the best we have is write them down. So we said after they'd seen the ad five times or three times or whatever they were assigned to randomly, the number of ads they were randomly assigned to see, we said, we need you to write down all of the thoughts that came to mind. And then we had research assistants decide whether the thoughts were positive or negative,

Starting point is 00:15:36 and we just added them up. And what we found was people who had this really strong attachment to a brand like Starbucks or Apple in the case of our research, they had the same number of negative thoughts as people who didn't. So you still get annoyed. What was really cool, though, was that they have to the brand by unconsciously creating, generating more positive thoughts about the ad and about the brand to protect that part of themselves. Starbucks is an important part of who I am. I go to Starbucks every day. I'm not a Timmy's drinker. I'm a Starbucks drinker. I'm not a Seattle's best drinker. I'm a Starbucks drinker. It's like a badge, right? It's I'm that kind of person. I'm a Starbucks person. So if I see Starbucks advertised over and over and over, and I start to get a little bit annoyed, well, I can't, I can't be that annoyed

Starting point is 00:16:35 with it. It's who I am. It's part of me. So you generate more positive thoughts. So you start feeling a little bit of negativity and your brain sort of sets off this warning and we have other research that didn't make it into pay into the paper like eye tracking which measures pupil dilation and what that does is it measures um how aroused you are and it didn't make it into the paper maybe it's a separate paper but we found data that with the eye tracking that sort of was consistent with the number of positive thoughts people were having, which was when they started to get more aroused, like they started to feel something. That's when they generated more positive thoughts. So they're protecting themselves.

Starting point is 00:17:17 You know, not just this is going to sound so predatory, but is there something that we marketers can do maybe in the copywriting to exploit? Is that the right word? This feeling of brand identity? Can we write an ad in a way to evoke these feelings of personal brand identity connected to the brand itself, you know, in a way to have an easy path to increase frequencies. Am I a horrible person? No, you're just saying out loud what every marketer wants to do. It's what we, you know, the goal is to inform and persuade, not just inform. So yes, the answer is yes, absolutely. And some ads already do it really effectively. The key is to tap into something that's really personal so that that person feels a personal connection at the individual level to a brand.

Starting point is 00:18:16 So examples of this, the best are always the Super Bowl ads. There's a company that nobody heard about that suddenly everybody was talking about called 84 Lumber. Never heard about that suddenly everybody was talking about called 84 lumber. Never heard about it until the super bowl. Why? Cause 84 lumber made this really controversial ad that basically, you know, you know, flip Donald Trump, the bird on his immigration policy and, and said, here is why we want immigrants in America.

Starting point is 00:18:43 And it was so controversial that fox wouldn't air it during the super bowl without major revisions so what they did is they revised the ad and then at the end of the ad they were like to see the whole ad go here and it gave you a link on youtube um so they've done it we saw what happened with bud light um with the campaign that they had that turned into a huge backlash so that's the risk right you take a stand you create an ad that creates that personal connection but you're always going to you're going to pick a side in a lot of cases yeah so you're you're taking a risk so if you're going to do this if you're going to do this, if you're going to create this personal connection, so you can overcome these negative effects of wear out, know your customer. I mean, it seems so basic, right? But know your customer because whatever it is that you're trying to create an

Starting point is 00:19:34 attachment to, make sure that the base that you're getting most of your revenue from, that they believe the same thing you believe, that they have the same values. What surprised you the most about your findings? Actually, the thing that surprised me the most is related to what we were just talking about. When my co-author, Joseph Redden, and I were first working on this, he suggested, this is a slam dunk if we can show that we can manipulate people's attachment to a brand and still show this sort of mitigation of wear out. And I was very skeptical that we could pull it off. And it worked on the first try. The second study, what we did is we had people write down,

Starting point is 00:20:23 we randomly assigned them to one of two conditions. That's what in experiments you call a condition where you're randomly told to do one thing or another. You know, in medicine, I'm going to give you a sugar pill or I'm going to give you the medicine. You don't know which is which, neither do the doctors. So basically, that's what we did. We randomly assigned people to one of two conditions. In one condition, we said, we want you to write down what it's like when you go to Starbucks. Just a general whatever. Nothing really. It's called the control because we're not trying to get them to do anything or write anything special. But the other half of the people, we said, we need you to write down the ways in which you feel a close personal connection to the Starbucks brand. And then we forced them to write for one minute. So it really, you know, most people wrote almost a full paragraph, these students, and it worked.

Starting point is 00:21:12 So regardless of whether you came in to the experiment, having a personal connection to Starbucks or not, making you remind yourself of how you might have a personal connection to Starbucks was enough to then show those people the Starbucks ad five times and see a significant difference in how much you like the ad and how much you like the brand compared to the people who just kind of wrote about Starbucks. You talk about sneaky marketing marketing that's kind of scary that we can actually make you feel more attached just by asking you to think about how you're more attached yeah it is super

Starting point is 00:21:53 interesting research i'm really glad you could share it with us thank you for your time yeah thank you very much for having me this was fun nelson amiral is an associate professor of marketing at ontario tech university this paper was published in the Journal of Advertising. It's called Battle of the Brand. Does brand attachment inoculate against the negative effects of ad repetition? We have a link to the study in today's show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 00:22:18 Back tomorrow with the day's news.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Tuning In the Right Frequency

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