Tara J.V. Flake and Professor Russell Mouritsen, Communications – Advertising and Marketing

Advertising departments worldwide face difficult and costly decisions every day. Their decisions include things like how to portray their product in the best way, what their advertisement should look and/or sound like and where their advertisement should be placed, just to name a few. Once their decisions are made and the ad is publicized, all a company can do is hope that it generates the results they want from the audience. Ideally, it will be well received and the audience responds positively and takes some sort of action. However, an ad that fails for any reason makes advertising a great risk both financially and for the company’s reputation.

Because of the dangerous risks associated with advertising, companies have many questions to ask before committing to advertising investments. The Advertising Consultants of Brigham Young University’s campus newspaper, The Daily Universe, are asked these kinds of questions every day by potential and current clients. They are basically asking one thing: what kinds of ads generate the best response from the readers of the newspaper? Until now, the advertising department of The Daily Universe was lacking the statistical data to answer that question. While there are aspects of advertisements that would be difficult to test for effectiveness, such as subjective characteristics like theme and design, it is possible to test the effectiveness of controllable and measurable factors like ad sizes and use of color. Results from effectiveness tests for controllable factors would provide potential clients with the statistical data they want.

My task was to find the common factor(s) among the ads which generated the highest response in the audience. I hypothesized that the highest rated ads would be alike in their size, or in their use of color (as opposed to only black and white). If the results did not support my hypotheses, I hoped that I could define what the common factor actually was, if one existed. As it turned out, not only were my hypotheses correct, but I was surprised to find even more common factors among the ads that generated a high level of response.

I composed an anonymous survey that was administered to The Daily Universe readers (BYU students) whom had recently read the newspaper in a controlled environment. Subjects were instructed to look through the newspaper as they normally would for a certain amount of time and were given the survey after that, but they were not told that the study was centered on advertising until after they had read the paper. This was done so that while looking through the paper, the subjects were not influenced to pay any more attention to the ads than they normally would. Some of the questions on the survey asked which one ad they remembered the most after reading the paper, which ads stood out to them on each spread (2 pages in the newspaper that face each other), and which ads they remembered seeing in a previous edition, as many of The Daily Universe clientele run their ads on a regular basis.

On the day the surveys were filled out, there were a total of 32 advertisements throughout the 12 page newspaper, and 3 of the ads were in full color while the rest were in black and white. The ad that was recalled the most out of the entire paper was the largest ad in the paper that day, roughly 2/3rds of one page, and was also the only ad in color on that entire spread. My hypothesis that size and color are the biggest factors in recall rates was confirmed by this and the fact that for each individual spread, the ad that was recalled at the highest rate was consistently the largest ad on the spread (and in color where color was present) with only one exception.

This non-conformity in my results caught my attention and gave light to another common thread in the highest rated ads. On the non-conforming spread which was completely black and white, the 4 biggest ads were roughly the same size and shape, so I assumed that the recall percentage would be nearly split 4 ways allowing for a few outliers for the remaining 5 smaller ads. However, the highest ranked ad (one of the 4 biggest) garnered an impressive 37% of the pool, while the other 3 of the same size only received 17.3%, 11.8%, and 1.6%. I wondered how this ad had such a high recall rate compared to the others which were the same size. Another interesting point was that a much smaller ad received 14.2% of the response on that spread. I compared the 37% ad and the 14.2% ad to the highest ranked ads from different spreads and found the next common thread: they all used more white space than text.

At first, I did not think that the design of an ad could be controlled to produce significant results related to audience recall because design is typically a subjective aspect. But I found the opposite to be true. There are certain parts to design, like the layout, that have proven to be objective. In my study, I found that ads which had a higher white space to text ratio consistently had higher recall rates that the ads that had mostly text. Also, each of the ads in the top 1/4th of the overall rankings featured one central figure surrounded by a large amount of white space, with minimal text found on one of the edges of the ad.

Other interesting findings included high rates for male subjects recalling ads featuring pictures of females, high rates for female subjects recalling ads featuring jewelry or babies, the spike in the recall rate for a fast food ad during the noon-time focus group, and very small yet frequently appearing (in other editions) ads receiving high recall rates. This information is as valuable to advertising clients as the information regarding size and color because if offers options to clients who cannot afford the big, colorful ads. According to my findings, clients with smaller budgets can still produce effective ads if they know how to correctly use white space and central figures that appeal to their target audience.

There were a few parts to this project that I could not control, which may have played into my results. For example, the recall rate of the food-related ads fluctuated significantly with the time of day. However, the overall results speak for themselves. I discovered first-hand how different factors affect the recall rate of advertisements, and thus how to increase the likelihood of calling the audience to action by making the ad more noticeable. I will be sharing the complete set of results with the Director of Advertising and the Advertising Consultants at The Daily Universe so they may provide useful statistics to their clients.