Ask any decent marketer, and we’re always looking for small actions and tweaks that can generate outsize results. And while these tend to be few and far between, a new study by Neuro-Insight, published in Mi3, might have found another one. The study looked at a very simple idea, based on a very clever insight:
The human brain tends to notice things that change more than things that don’t, so do small changes in Digital Out of Home creative generate improved memory retention?
To study this, the researchers set up two advertising panels and measured the memory encoding of static (non-evolving) vs evolving creative over the course of a week. They found that over the week, evolving creative resulted in higher memory encoding, ending up at 38% higher than the static by the end of the week.
It's neat when studies reinforce something intuitive. In our daily commutes (when we could commute), we’d walk past the same building a hundred times, and after the first 10 or so times, barely notice it. But if there’s something different about that building, we’re much more likely to notice it and augment our memory of that building with the new information.
The other interesting finding from the study was that very little had to change in the creative itself. You don’t actually want totally different creative every day, as you’ll throw away previous memory encodings. Instead, small tweaks to copy or design are enough to trigger the effect. And with the increasing presence of digital placements, it’s increasingly easy to do.
A final word: usually, a single study isn’t enough to sway AFFINITY’s opinion, and we generally look for broader trends over one-off research. But in this case, the cost of making the change is so low, and the upside so high, that it makes sense to trial this finding and experiment yourself. And to do it fast – your competitors may cotton onto this as well.
