Interactive Ads More Effective Than Traditional TV Commercials
By Anna Johnson on December 22nd, 2009Research by Microsoft and Initiative has found that interactive advertisements generate greater interest and ad recall than traditional television ad spots.
In a pilot study conducted by neuroscience company EmSense, test subjects were exposed to various media and advertising campaigns from Hyundai and Kia Motors while wearing a special sensor-laden headset.
The headset tracked brain activity, breathing rate, head motion, heart rate, blink rate and skin temperature while the test subjects saw, firstly, ad placements on Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE, and secondly, a couple of traditional 30 and 60 second video commercials.
The Xbox LIVE campaigns consisted of interactive billboards users could click through to a branded landing page where they could then interact with content and download videos. The traditional videos were a 30-second television spot for Hyundai and a 60-second in-theater spot for Kia Motors America.
After viewing each of the Xbox LIVE campaigns on the one hand, and the TV ads on the other, the test subjects participated in a post-exposure survey.
The results of the survey were that the test subjects spent more time with, and had greater recall of and higher levels of emotional and cognitive response to, the Xbox LIVE ad placements, than they did with the traditional video spots.
The interactive capabilities of Xbox LIVE enabled an additional 238 seconds of engagement beyond the traditional video ads, which led to increased unaided recall and brand awareness. In particular, the Xbox LIVE ads delivered 90 percent unaided brand recall, compared with 78 percent unaided brand recall rates for the 60-second spot.
It makes sense. As we all know from attempting to learn something, the more interactive the experience, the more likely we are to be mentally and emotionally engage with – and remember – it.
