Marketing Science Busts Media Myths

This month our peers at MediaScience, a provider of lab-based audience research, posted a series of myth busters, some of which you may find surprising. These insights are based on several brand and publisher neuroscience research projects. There are some amazing nuggets here, worth bookmarking and filing.

We are sharing a few stand-outs below, but you can check out the entire series on their LinkedIn page.

• Consumers ARE able to multi-task in video viewing, so branded screen overlays are actually processed quite well by consumers. Some industry experts hypothesized that viewing video content and processing a branded overlay was asking viewers to process too many things.
• How should ad breaks be structured? As it turns out, focus groups perceive six, short ad breaks as less intrusive than two longer ad breaks. The problem is clutter, not frequency.
• Bigger is not always better for display ads. In a mobile ad study, the sidekick (small ad unit in lower corner of screen) performed as well as an interstitial.
• “Click for more information” is nearly the worst call to action a marketer can select. In fact, MediaScience called it “the kiss of death.” Instead use the word “free,” which drove response up nearly 600% in an interactive CTV campaign tested.
• The best brand integrations are quizzes that test consumer knowledge of surrounding content. E.g. Quiz the viewer on their knowledge of the characters and plot.
• Much to the chagrin of every creative I know, :06-second ads actually work. Of course, :30-seconds works better, but surprisingly a :06-second creative lends 60% of the memory impact of a :30-second creative.