Ads with in-jokes stay with viewers longer
Drawing on the time-honored movie and sitcom practice of callbacks – where jokes, plot or character elements are put into different contexts for (hopefully) comedic effect – is a good way for brands to make consumers laugh and also build trust, according to researchers at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Yuji Winet, an assistant professor of marketing at the school, and other researchers analyzed callbacks in thousands of Netflix comedies and in feature films to quantify how much more effective callbacks were in inducing laughs than regular jokes.
And then, in an experiment, they showed 17 TV commercials to 748 participants. Some ads were shown once, some twice and some were callback ads, selected from an Energizer Bunny campaign that employed callbacks. These were shown in pairs: an Energizer Bunny commercial followed by a callback commercial – a seemingly unrelated ad disrupted by the arrival of the bunny.
To test which commercials were most memorable, the researchers gave participants a surprise memory test immediately after watching the ads and a second test two weeks later. Initially, both repeated ads and the callback ads showed an advantage over ads shown only once. But after two weeks, the callback ads were remembered significantly more than the twice-shown ads, which by then performed no better than the single ads.
“Two weeks later, they still remembered the callback ads quite well, whereas the repeated ads were almost completely forgotten, to the point where it was no different from having seen the ad only once,” Winet says.
Further experiments with jokes revealed that participants reported greater enjoyment from callback jokes compared with non-callback jokes. They also expressed a greater likelihood of sharing the experience with their friends. The key, Winet says, was that callbacks gave consumers the feeling of being guided through the experience.
By setting up consumers to understand things in one way, then reshaping those things so they can be understood in another way, the creator tells the consumer, “‘I understand you. You can trust me. Enjoy the experience,’” Winet says.
In the context of brand experiences, this may translate into consumers feeling more positive about the brand and being more willing to pay for its products. “Callbacks improve consumer experiences by making them more memorable, more enjoyable, more meaningful and more rewarding. This can lead to better downstream marketing outcomes like higher star ratings and more sharing by word of mouth, while making experiences worth paying more for,” Winet says.