Global First Neuro Study – Evolving Creative is More Memorable!

Leading Australian digital outdoor media company QMS, has unveiled its latest neuroscience study that demonstrates the relative impact of different Out of Home (OOH) creative approaches and their overall effectiveness for brands.

In partnership with Neuro-Insight, this global first research study captured real-life, continuous digital and static OOH panels over consecutive days, to accurately measure how the human brain responds to a piece of creative advertising each day.

The study revealed that long term memory encoding, critical for campaign effectiveness, continues to grow in respondents that are exposed to evolving creative. In fact, creative that evolves was shown to deliver a 38% higher impact than that of static creative by day 5.

Spanning 30 creatives across 15 categories, one of the strongest performing campaigns in the study harnessed the capabilities of digital OOH (DOOH) with a simple creative change that displayed the day of the week matched with the live temperature at the time, to deliver an 18% stronger result than the average DOOH campaign.

QMS Chief Strategy Officer, Christian Zavecz said that it was integral for both media owners and advertisers to properly understand the additional value the capabilities of DOOH delivers and how they can be used to drive greater campaign efficacy.

“DOOH in Australia already represents 61% of the industry* however, the uptake of creative capabilities amongst clients is still quite low.

“Now, for the first time, we can quantify what we have always intuitively thought about the medium. Incorporating the strategic use of creative evolution into a brand’s campaign is now proven to increase its effectiveness,” said Zavecz.

Zavecz added, “The study also uncovered some important lessons about frequency and the role that DOOH, through its breadth of capabilities, can play in being able to maximise effective OOH campaign reach.”

In addition, the research also revealed that whilst static creative works well at providing brands with continuity or branding objectives, evolving the creative message enables brands to more effectively communicate new information and therefore add more layers to a campaign.

“For the first time, we can now scientifically prove that static images on OOH or DOOH do a great job at reminding audiences. But with evolving creative, campaigns can start to maximise their frequency with small changes to the creative helping to establish or build new memories to enhance a campaign’s performance. These changes can be as simple as a colour change, or copy updating each day.

“We looked at how different DOOH capabilities changed the memory encoding bias across both the Detailed Left Brain and Global Right Brain – known as the Neurostate^tm. This now shows us how over time, evolving creative helps build new memories each time it is seen, which also ultimately drives a higher cumulative impact for the overall campaign,” said Mr Pynta.

The Royals Head of Strategy, Tom Donald whose work for Coopers was included in the research study, agreed the findings change the way OOH needs to be considered and utilised.

“Knowing how different OOH creative impacts a consumer’s memory should now make creatives and strategists rethink how they use OOH from this point on. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel, but we can think of OOH beyond just an awareness medium. With the speed and flexibility of DOOH, there are no excuses not to make small changes to the creative over the life of a campaign, for maximum impact.

The pioneering study is the third iteration of QMS’ investment into better understanding the real impact of DOOH on consumers through neuroscience and together with its Go Digital and Go Unique studies, can now help clients gain an even deeper understanding of how to maximise their investment into DOOH to deliver real results.

To watch a recording of the webinar unveiling this study, please click here.