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Have you seen an advert which you didn’t know the brand it was promoting until the end of the advert?

How did you feel about the advert?  Have you tried to guess the brand before revealed?

Background 

One common strategy employed by the advert creators is to delay the brand-reveal timing towards the end of the advert and evoke curiosity in audience by hiding the brand information throughout the advert. Although we, the audience, often enjoy such adverts with a creative spin, the effectiveness of the late brand-reveal strategy in promotion is still unknown. Previous studies have found contradictory findings, with some finding enhanced enjoyment of the advert and others showing the opposite maladaptive effects of the strategy.

Thus, we decided to investigate this question: Is an advert with delayed brand-reveal better than an advert with early brand-reveal? 

Measure of a “good advert” – Physiological Synchrony 

An advert must be able to engage the audience, to promote the brand, deliver the message and be remembered. We decided to use physiological synchrony measure of engagement in addition to a survey, as a more objective measure with proneness to biases. 

Physiological Synchrony is increasingly used in research as a measure of audience engagement. When we watch a stimulus (e.g., video & adverts) we constantly experience various emotions, and this causes our physiologies to change.

For example, during an exciting scene our heart-rate goes up, and when we are focussed our heart-rate goes down, creating a unique physiological pattern.

Physiological synchrony brings together the physiological patterns of all audience watching the same stimulus and calculates how well the patterns are synchronised. More synchronised physiological patterns indicate that audience are experiencing similar emotions, thus more emotionally engaged with the stimulus. We decided to use patterns of heart-rate and skin surface sweat level (known as EDA) to measure the physiological synchrony amongst the audience. They can be measured using a multisensory recording device called EmotiBit.

Our Study

To investigate the effects of brand-reveal timings, we created two versions of adverts. Firstly, we sampled six adverts from past Super Bowl games, which had the brand-reveal towards the end of the advert. Then we cropped the brand-reveal scene and edited it onto the beginning of the advert. This became the early-reveal version, and the original (unedited) advert became the late-reveal version.  

We invited 97 participants to conduct a study in our laboratory. When they entered the lab, EmotiBit was fitted on their middle-finger, which recorded their heart-rate and EDA, throughout the study. During the study participants watched six adverts and answered a short questionnaire about each advert and how much they liked it. They watched each advert once, either the early-reveal or the late-reveal version. After the data collection, all physiological data were analysed and synchrony scores were calculated for heart-rate and EDA separately.

What We Found 

Which version did participants find better? 

We asked participants three questions and asked them to rate each advert on a scale of 1-100: “How much did you find the advert emotionally engaging?”, “How much did you like the advert overall?” and “Did it make you feel positively towards the brand?” 

We found that there was no difference in ratings between the late-reveal (original) and the early-reveal (edited) versions, for all three questions. The average scores were slightly higher for the early-reveal version but the magnitude was negligible (less than 1.5 scores difference)

Which version did their physiologies indicate as better? 

We compared the synchrony scores of heart-rate and EDA while watching the late-reveal (original) version and the early-reveal (edited) version. Again, no significant difference was found between the two versions, indicating that participants experienced similar levels of engagement for the two versions.

What These Study Results Indicate 

Is delayed brand-reveal a good strategy? 

Our study has found no significant difference between the late-reveal version and the early-reveal version of the adverts in both questionnaire data and physiological synchrony data This indicates that the brand-reveal timing does not affect the advert engagement and preference.  

What does this mean for the advertising industry? 

The non-significant findings of this study were surprising but have significant implications. This study indicated that we edited and jumbled up the narrative order of the advert and still created an equally engaging advert. This is possibly devastating, considering the amount of money, time and professional creativity spent creating an advert, such as the ones used in this study, with a rich storyline leading up to the grand brand-reveal. However, such creative narratives and the late brand-reveal strategy may not be bringing them the desired effects. This highlights the difficulty of balancing creativity and effectiveness and the importance of conducting empirical research into the psychological effects of creative strategies.

 Study Limitations & Improvements 

Our research was conducted in a lab setting, where participants were presented with adverts one after another. As you know, adverts are generally presented during breaks of videos or TV programmes. Moreover, the participants were (hopefully!) paying a close attention to the adverts as they are taking part in a scientific study. However, in real-life, people often do not pay attention to adverts, or they are given a choice to skip after few seconds. Thus, in such a case, delayed brand-reveal and curiosity-evoking strategies may impact the effectiveness of adverts differently.  

This study can be done less artificially (not in a laboratory), for example by collaborating with a cinema.

Key Takeaways  

This research highlighted a challenging element of advertisement, what seems to be an effective strategy may not actually work. Thus, it is vital to continue to provide scientific insights into such creative strategies. This was the first study to employ physiological synchrony to measure the effectiveness of advertisement strategy in increasing audience engagement. This objective, implicit measure of emotional engagement can be used to scientifically validate other and new creative strategies.

References

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2. Fazio, R. H., Herr, P. M., & Powell, M. C. (1992). On the Development and Strength of Category–Brand Associations in Memory: The Case of Mystery Ads. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 1(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1057-7408(08)80042-3 

3. Ruan, B., Hsee, C. K., & Lu, Z. Y. (2018). The teasing effect: An underappreciated benefit of creating and resolving an uncertainty. Journal of Marketing Research, 55(4), 556–570. https://doi.org/10.1509/JMR.15.0346 

4. Baker, W. E., Honea, Heather., & Russell, C. A. (2004). Do Not Wait to Reveal the Brand Name: The Effect of Brand-Name Placement on Television Advertising Effectiveness. Journal of Advertising, 33(3), 77–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2004.10639170 

5. ​​Pepsi: ‘Great Acting or Great Taste?’ | Super Bowl 2023. (2023). Retrieved April 21, 2024, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/sports/pepsi-great-acting-or-great-taste-super-bowl-2023/2023/02/12/a16d9c75-0ac6-400d-87f7-2c4fabb88a7a_video.html