How To Craft Memorability in Multi-Platform Advertising

10/6/22, 10:29 AM How to craft memorability in multi-platform advertising | WARC
How to craft memorability in multi-platform advertising

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13 min read
Orlando Wood
Admap Magazine, September 2018
Summary
With campaigns with short-term aims on the rise and an ever growing amount of platforms to run them on, this article offers marketers guidance
on the best way to create effective multi-platform work.
Using insights from behavioural science, marketers are advised to put most of their efforts into designing for System 1 thinking by creating the three
System 1 heuristics of fame, feeling and fluency.
The article explains how to create Fluent Devices, with examples from successful campaign strategies, and assesses their effectiveness.
The Fluent Device is a recurring property or conceit created by a brand and used as the primary vehicle for the story in more than one ad across a
campaign.
It concludes by urging digital advertisers, who are striving to create relevant content for their audiences, to revisit the Fluent Device to make online
platforms work.
A golden age for ad technology has not translated into a golden age for advertising. Short-termism is rising,
and effectiveness is falling. Recent work from the IPA has suggested that campaign effectiveness is
deteriorating: it's increasingly rare that brands are achieving very large business effects. The same work tells us
that the proportion of campaigns with short-term aims is on the rise, even though it's still long-term
campaigns that create the greater uplifts in effectiveness. And finally, the number of channels continues to
proliferate, with serious disagreements over which to focus on and how to make advertising work across them.
It's never been more important or urgent that we ask ourselves 'what should a successful multi-platform
campaign look like?'
The answer is to be found in behavioural science – the study of how human beings make decisions. The key
insight from psychology and behavioural economics over the past 20 years is a growing realisation that we
think much less than we think we think. Our decisions are guided primarily by what Nobel laureate Daniel
Kahneman calls System 1 – a fast, intuitive, emotionally driven and automatic mode of thinking. On rare
occasions we use our slower, more calculating System 2 thinking to change the decisions System 1 makes, but
mostly System 2 is a'lazy policeman' that justifies and rubber stamps our gut feelings. The implication for
marketers is simple: put most of your effort into designing for System 1.
How do advertisers do this? By creating the three System 1 heuristics, or mental shortcuts, that people use to
decide between options. We call them Fame, Feeling and Fluency, and these are what advertisers looking to
design for System 1 need to build.
Fame is achieving mental availability among as many people as possible. If a brand comes readily to mind,
System 1 automatically considers it a good choice. Almost all advertising can build Fame, assuming it's not
targeted at a narrow audience who already know and buy the brand. Beyond broad targeting, how can
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advertising achieve Fame? By creating Feeling and Fluency.
Feeling is a positive emotional response. If I feel good about something, my System 1 automatically considers it
a good choice. Emotional advertising builds Feeling for a brand. Work by the IPA has shown the importance
of emotion for long-term advertising effectiveness. Campaigns that adopt an entirely emotional strategy are
almost twice as likely to generate long-term business effects as campaigns that opt for a rational or'mixed'
approach.
And finally, there's Fluency, which is perhaps the most interesting and least explored of all. Fluency is all about
the speed with which we recognise and process things. System 1 is a pattern-recognition machine, constantly
scanning the environment for regularities. A Fluent brand or advertisement is one that we can recognise and
understand very quickly, and if we recognise something quickly, System 1 automatically considers it a good
choice.
What is a Fluent Device?
The advertising industry has long understood the importance of creating patterns, properties or devices to
help people process and remember brands, but it's only really now that we understand why they work and why
they are so important. Devices such as Leo Burnett's Tony the Tiger or John Webster's Hofmeister Bear were
used to generate high levels of Fluency, Feeling and Fame for brands for much of the 20th century, and you can
find examples dating back as far as the 1920s. But they are also uniquely placed to respond to the challenges
facing creatives in the late 2010s.
The Fluent Device is a recurring property or conceit created by the brand and used as the primary vehicle for
the story in more than one ad across a campaign. It might be a character that reappears from ad to ad and
whose adventures we follow, like Bud Light's hapless medieval King in its 2018 'Dilly Dilly' Super Bowl
campaign. Or it could be a repeated slogan that sustains multiple executions, like Snickers' 'You're Not You
When You're Hungry'. It might even involve both, like Dos Equis' 'The Most Interesting Man in the World',
and his 'I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis' catchphrase.
Fluency is an emerging discipline in psychology and we are waking up to the fact that quick recognition and
processing are key to acceptance, trust, liking and value perceptions. So it's worth looking more closely at how
it affects brands and advertisements.
Brands create Fluency by building what Byron Sharp calls Distinctive Assets – things that are instantly
associated with a brand. Think Starbucks' mermaid, the Nike swoosh, or Coke's distinctive red. When you see
those things, you instantly recognise the brand – your System 1 takes in the familiar elements and brings the
brand to mind without active thought. That's Fluency in action.
So a brand with strong Distinctive Assets enjoys a great deal of Fluency: people recognise it quickly. And, of
course, advertising is a great opportunity to imprint your Distinctive Assets in the minds of your audience. But
advertising is also a great opportunity to create properties that entertain, and a Fluent Device – a great
character or slogan – is a Distinctive Asset on steroids.
Take KFC's Colonel Sanders character, for instance, who in 2015 made the jump from being a straightforward
brand mascot based on the chain's real-life founder (a Distinctive Asset) to the star of a series of humorous ads
played by a variety of actors (a Fluent Device). Seeing the Colonel in an ad immediately creates and
strengthens an association with KFC and builds anticipation for whatever new twist the new actor would bring
to the role. In 2018, for example, country singer Reba McEntire became the first female Colonel. By turning
their mascot into a Fluent Device, KFC generated Feeling and Fluency in one potent package.
Fluent Devices work all over the world. Britain has Aleksandr Orlov, of comparethemarket.com
(http://comparethemarket.com), aka 'Compare The Meerkat' – a character who helped his brand emerge as brand
leader in a very competitive market. In Brazil, Batata, a grumpy roadside basket seller, deals with clueless
motorists, in ads for petrol and services giant Ipiranga. In Japan, Otosan, the talking dog, has, through
hundreds of surreal commercials, helped SoftBank become a global telecoms player.
A quick glance at this year's US Super Bowl ads reveals more examples of Fluent Device campaigns. Bud
Light's Bud Light King and his absurd 'Dilly Dilly' catchphrase featured in half a dozen ads in the Super Bowl
lead-up. System 1 testing found they consistently outscored other teasers for emotional impact. And M&Ms
scored one of the most amusing commercials of the night with their 'Human' spot, which generated high levels
of emotional response by bringing back the brand's iconic living M&Ms, but with a comic twist as the hapless
red M&M transforms into Danny DeVito.
But there's one area where Fluent Devices should really shine in 21 st century advertising: digital and social
media channels. What makes Fluency so crucial to branding success, namely speed of recognition, is also
critical to internet advertising effectiveness. Put simply, speed is priority in online advertising, and that makes
creating Fluency even more important, whether it's a video ad appearing in a Facebook newsfeed, a Twitter
feed or a six-second YouTube bumper.
For all the talk of Millennial viewers skipping TV ads, we mustn't forget that ad avoidance and skipping are
cross-channel behaviours. Our figures suggest that 50% of viewers will have stopped or skipped an online video
ad by the time it reaches its five-second mark. Others will watch on mute, or only see a still from a video.
Whether it's short- or long-form video, instant recognition of a Fluent Device may help create a brand
impression in even inattentive viewers. Better still, an ad featuring a favourite character might even prevent the
viewer from skipping altogether.
And then there's social media, which is a natural channel for brands to create Fluency. A big part of what
makes things easy to process and recognise is congruence – a feeling of natural fit between content and its
context. The timeliness of successful tweets, like Oreo's famous Super Bowl blackout tweet, exploits this aspect
of Fluency. Fluent Devices are a natural fit with social media as they're so often persona or character based,
and they can also enhance congruence. When the Philadelphia Falcons won this year's Super Bowl, Bud Light
could quickly switch its 'Dilly Dilly' catchphrase for'Philly Philly'. In short, Fluent Devices are a perfect fit
with the modern media world in which brands find themselves.
Measuring Fluent Device effectiveness
This is why Fluent Devices are so interesting today. But is there any evidence that they are effective? Working
with the IPA's effectiveness database, we embarked on an analysis to find out.
We developed a hypothesis: 'Long-term campaigns with a Fluent Device are more likely to generate profit gain
than campaigns that don't.'
We set ourselves three tasks. First, scour the IPA database, going back to 1992, to find long-term campaigns.
Then, code up campaigns which used a Fluent Device – without seeing their effectiveness, to prevent bias
inadvertently creeping in. Then hand our list of tagged campaigns back to the IPA for Peter Field to compare
the effectiveness of long-term campaigns that used a Fluent Device with the effectiveness of those that didn't.
Before we could do that we also needed to settle on our definition of Fluent Devices. We used two definitions.
The first was around the character-based campaigns we'd originally noticed.'A fictitious character or
characters (humans or creatures) created by the brand and used as the primary vehicle for the drama in more
than one ad across a campaign.' So in a UK context, this meant the likes of Renault's Papa and Nicole,
Hofmeister's George the Bear, and so on.
The second definition centred on scenarios and slogans. Our definition ran:'A creative conceit, expressed as a
slogan, used more than once in a campaign as the primary vehicle for the drama without which the ad would
make little sense.' So we looked for the likes of Specsavers' 'Should've gone to Specsavers', Snickers' 'You're not
you when you're hungry', etc.
These definitions help to mark out Fluent Devices as something different from either emotional storytelling
ads or ads featuring more straightforward distinctive assets, such as a logo or a jingle. The definition makes it
clear that the Fluent Device should appear more than once in a campaign – so the classic John Lewis UK
Christmas ads, for instance, wouldn't count as a Fluent Device campaign, as Monty The Penguin, Moz The
Monster, and their other characters only ever appear once. The definitions also make clear that the Fluent
Device is the primary vehicle for the drama – so classic brand mascots, like the Jolly Green Giant, aren't
Fluent Devices either, unless they drive the story of the ads.
Our analysis of the IPA Databank gave us a rich selection of campaigns to examine. Overall, there were over
620 long-term campaigns in the database. Of these, over 490 campaigns dated from 1992 or later. That date is
important because in 1991 the IPA introduced its 'Long and Broad Effects' award, and the number of long-
term campaign entries markedly increased in 1992. We coded up all campaigns since 1992 that employed a
Fluent Device, but for the effectiveness analysis we looked at the 330 or so campaigns from 1999 onwards. This
is when new effectiveness fields were introduced and have remained consistent since.
So, do Fluent Devices make ads more effective?
The power of Fluent Devices
First of all, let's see how common the technique is. Of the 492 campaigns since 1992 that we categorised, we
found roughly equal numbers of them using a character-based device and a slogan-based device. Taken
together, around a quarter of all the campaigns we studied used a Fluent Device. That ratio also applied to the
effectiveness data set (campaigns since 1998). The Fluent Device has been a common, though never dominant,
campaign strategy for advertisers and agencies seeking effectiveness awards for the past quarter of a century. Is
it a successful strategy? The evidence suggests it is (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Long-term campaigns with Fluent Devices are much more likely to achieve profit gain
Source: System 1 Group
Long-term campaigns that use a Fluent Device are a third more likely to report very large business effects of
market share and profit gain. Using a Fluent Device in a long-term campaign improves your odds of hitting
these major business effects.
Is this simply a function of spend? Perhaps brands that create characters or situations for Fluent Devices
spend more to get them into the public mind. Filtering the campaigns on those that reported extra share of
voice (ESOV) allows us to examine this (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Fluent Device campaigns are more effective and more efficient
Within this subset, we continue to see improvements on effectiveness for campaigns with a Fluent Device, but
we also see something remarkable about the support they receive. The Fluent Device campaigns have, on
average, over three points of ESOV less than those without. In other words, with a Fluent Device, there's
evidence that you're getting greater long-term impact for less spend. Fluent Devices are both more effective
and more efficient over the long term.
Slogans vs. characters
Is there any difference in effectiveness between Fluent Devices based on characters and those based on
slogans? It's worth stressing that any Fluent Device is better than none, but within that there do seem to be
differences in the business effects a brand can expect.
Character-based Fluent Devices have a better chance of winning over new customers and they have a slightly
better chance of creating share gain (Figure 3). They also have a better chance of reducing price elasticity. This
business effect is a very rare one for any advertising campaign, but it does tie in with what we know about
Fluency from psychological studies, which is that we confer greater value on things that are quick and easy to
process. Consistent use of highly visual Fluent Devices across media platforms helps to reduce price
sensitivity.
Figure 3: Character Fluent Devices generate larger, longer and broader effects
What about slogan-based Fluent Devices? We see that they have marginally more impact on profit gain (lower
production costs perhaps than character-based Fluent Devices), and on short-term sales activation.
Why might this be? Character Fluent Devices are highly visual, so broadly recognisable even to non-buyers,
and that helps them expand a brand's reach. A slogan Fluent Device, meanwhile, is easier for people to imitate
or parody, and serves as a call to action for those people in the market for the product (e.g.'Should've gone to
Specsavers'), which means it can achieve a cultural impact – and a sales impact – more quickly.
Before we look at how the Fluent Device has fared in recent years, it's worth considering what we call Hired
Devices.
Often a brand will borrow a ready-made character or celebrity for its long-running campaign. In the UK
context, think Jamie Oliver for supermarket Sainsbury's, for instance, or footballer Gary Lineker's long-term
association with Walkers Crisps. In the US, Nespresso has used George Clooney in a series of entertaining ads.
We defined these as:'A real or fictitious character or characters (humans or creatures) deployed in more than
one ad across a campaign but not created by the brand.'
These off-the-shelf Fluent Devices don't work as well, on average, as the characters brands create for
themselves. Relatively few of the campaigns in the IPA database used Hired Devices, so base sizes were small.
Even so, the results are at least an indication that Hired Devices are less useful for long-term growth than
'pure' character-based Fluent Devices (Figure 4). In our data set, these borrowed characters are less likely to
create share gain or profit gain. But they are a little more likely to create very large short-term activation
effects.
Figure 4: Indication that hired devices are less useful for long-term growth
A Fluent Device works because it creates both Feeling (positive emotion) and Fluency (a lasting mental
connection with the brand). A Hired Device is instantly recognisable, attracts attention and so can help to
create short-term activation effects, but it is less likely to generate long-term effects because it isn't as
distinctive as a Fluent Device and, indeed, could have been used by other brands too.
The benefits of Fluent Devices
The benefits of Fluent Devices, and which types work best, can be summarised as follows. First, Fluent
Devices are more effective – in terms of your chances of profit gain and share gain rise – and they're more
efficient too. Second, Fluent Devices are particularly powerful because they combine Fluency and Feeling:
they speak to the System 1 pattern-recognition machine and evoke a powerful emotional response. Third,
character Fluent Devices generate larger and longer effects, including penetration gain and reductions in price
sensitivity. Fourth, slogan Fluent Devices work almost as well in the long term and marginally better in the
short term. And finally, Hired Devices, namely characters appropriated by brands, are less effective on average
in the long term than a pure character Fluent Device.
The conclusions are clear: Fluent Devices don't just make for memorable advertising, they make for effective
and efficient advertising.
Fluent Devices in decline
Given the benefits of using them, you might expect Fluent Devices to be going from strength to strength, but
far from it. The Fluent Device, if the IPA Databank is any guide, is in serious trouble. When the IPA
introduced its Long-term Effectiveness category, back in 1992, fully 41% of submissions contained a Fluent
Device. In 2016, that had fallen to 12% (Figure 5). It's an approach that significantly improves your chances of
long-term profit and share gain and generates strong short-term effects too. But fewer brands are using it than
ever.
Figure 5: The demise of the Fluent Device
When we plot the decline of the Fluent Device against the level of viewer enjoyment of TV advertising, we see
a worrying relationship (Figure 6).
Figure 6: The demise of the Fluent Device might explain falling viewer advertising enjoyment
This might be coincidence, of course, rather than causal, but at least up until 2006 – the last year we have full
TGI data from this question – the two track very closely. The proportion of viewers who claim they enjoy the
ads as much as the programmes halved between 1992 and 2006 – tracking the demise of the Fluent Device. It's
worth reminding ourselves that Fluent Devices – both characters and slogans – worked because people liked
them. They were entertaining, part of pop culture, and proud of it. And this matters for the industry, for the
regard in which society holds it, the levels of trust it engenders, and in turn for the talent that it attracts.
So we're left with one big question. What happened? Let's explore a few hypotheses. One cause might be
structural shifts in ad spend. The majority of Fluent Devices – almost two-thirds of them – were used by
FMCG brands. As FMCG spend falls, maybe the Fluent Device is a casualty of that shift.
It's also the case that short-term objectives are on the rise. The proportion of cases in the IPA's database which
are dedicated to short-term campaigns has been rising steadily for a decade. This thinking is no doubt
affecting campaign development and certainly there has been a tendency to drop long-term devices in favour
of something new and often less memorable. Sadly, Fluent Devices wear out more quickly in the boardroom
than among the general public.
There are many cases of Fluent Devices surviving and thriving around the world. But could it be that the
populist artifice of the Fluent Device runs counter to the current adland desire for authenticity and
storytelling? Digital advertisers strive to create relevant content for their audiences, but there's every chance
that content that is deemed 'relevant' by marketers has actually killed off the Fluent Device. The adoption of
online channels coincides with the Fluent Device's demise (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Has the search for audience 'relevance' killed off the Fluent Device?
If the two phenomena are related, it's a major opportunity missed. Audiences have much greater control of
online platforms and they process them at speed. Advertisers need to embrace the idea of Fluency if they are
to make online platforms work for them. In these environments, a familiar character or slogan will both speak
to the fast and frugal System 1 pattern-recognition machine and generate an emotional impression. Memes –
the lingua franca of internet culture – obey the same 'familiarity plus novelty' structure as Fluent Devices, after
all.
About the author
Orlando Wood
Chief innovation officer, System1 Group
orlando.wood@system1group.com (mailto:orlando.wood@system1group.com)
Orlando Wood is chief innovation officer at System1 Group and member of the IPA’s advisory board.
Topics
Brand identity & image (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Brand-identity_image/Brand%20identity%20&%20image)
Brand character (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Brand-character/Brand%20character)
Copywriting & slogans (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Copywriting_slogans/Copywriting%20&%20slogans)
Emotion (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Emotion/Emotion)
Recall & recognition (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Campaign-tracking/Recall%20&%20recognition)
Long-term vs short-term effectiveness (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Effectiveness/Long-term%20vs%20short-term%20effectiveness)
Global (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Global/Global)
Behavioural economics (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au//search/Behavioural-insight/Behavioural%20economics)
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10/6/22, 10:29 AM How to craft memorability in multi-platform advertising | WARC

Admap Magazine, September 2018

advertising achieve Fame? By creating Feeling and Fluency.

What is a Fluent Device?

Measuring Fluent Device effectiveness

So, do Fluent Devices make ads more effective?

The power of Fluent Devices

Source: System 1 Group

Source: System 1 Group

Slogans vs. characters

Source: System 1 Group

Source: System 1 Group

The benefits of Fluent Devices

Fluent Devices in decline

Figure 5: The demise of the Fluent Device

Source: System 1 Group

Source: System 1 Group

Source: System 1 Group

About the author

Chief innovation officer, System1 Group

© Copyright Ascential Events (Europe) Limited 2018

Ascential Events (Europe) Limited

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