A new study has revealed that unconventional and highly creative and original ads lead to better results across the board, regardless of brand size or familiarity. You can read the full study for free here.
Publishing in the Journal of Advertising, researchers from the University of Amsterdam found that using regular physical objects as a medium to serve an ad message produced exceptional results.
This stands in contrast to more traditional advertising media, such as print, TV, radio, billboards, and online or social media.
Heineken’s shutter billboards during the COVID pandemic and, funnily enough, Warner Bros.’ activation to promote 2011 movie Contagion, were both listed as great examples of unconventional marketing.
“We found that creative media advertising has an overall positive effect on brand association strength. This means that, compared to traditional media advertising, creative media advertising leads to stronger brand associations,” the researchers explained.
They also found that consumers were generally more persuaded by creative media advertising than through traditional media. What’s more, creative ad placements had a significant positive effect on attitudes to adverts, the brand, purchase intentions and electronic word of mouth — basically social media chatter.
Use of metaphors in advertising had an overall positive effect on brand association and persuasion.
“A metaphoric medium could thus be an effective creative ad because it might generate positive affect, help people process the message better, and even signal that the firm invested effort (time and money) into the ad,” the researchers explained.
Contrary to their expectations, the researchers found that brand familiarity had no bearing on the effects of creative and unconventional adverts. In reality, creative ads work just as well for unfamiliar brands as they do for familiar brands.
“We expected that the more stable preexisting attitudes toward familiar brands would reduce the effectiveness of creative media advertising for familiar brands,” they explained, before adding, “our results also do not support the notion that existing associations with a familiar brand could aid comprehension of creative media advertising and subsequently drive persuasion.”
The researchers also found that, for strengthening brand associations, indirect exposure to a brand’s creative media advertising, through print or social media, for example, seems to be more effective than direct exposure to the type of advertising in real life.
They believed that seeing unconventional work in print or social media allows viewers to fully process and parse the ad’s meaning in isolation, without other external stimuli, such as passing cars or people, to distract them.
