"Because You Wouldn't Eat Your Best Friend"

We've been talking a lot in our "10 Ways to Improve Your Ads" about how putting a celebrity in your ad isn't going to cut it. And that' true! But what about when you combine a beloved celebrity, a six-foot chicken and a compelling narrative around an unlikely friendship?

SUCCESS! That's what we found out when we measured our brains' reaction to Drew Barrymore's new ad for Quorn - a meatless chicken product. 

This week, we decided to put to test one of Ad Age's "Top Five Creative Campaigns You Need to Know About." As Ann Christine Diaz writes, "The plant-based food brand space is getting increasingly crowded, but this absurd, delightful tale of friendship starring Drew Barrymore and a feathered friend helps U.K.-based Quorn distinguish itself from the rest of the flock in its first U.S. brand push."

We gave the ad a whirl and our brains' agreed with Diaz!

Overall Performance

Immersion measures what the brain values in realtime and is indexed on a scale of 1-100. Because brains like to rest, it can be difficult to maintain high levels of immersion for long periods of time. Anything over 40 is good and anything over 65 is outstanding. 

Drew and her feathered-friend were well over 40 for the majority of the ad! 

You can see in this measurement this ad was about three points below the industry average, but it still effectively drove immersion to capture emotional response and contribute to consumers' recall on the product and indicates they are likely to take future action. 

That is a huge accomplishment for a UK brand dipping their toe into US marketing for the first time trying to garner some brand recognition. 

Second-by-Second Measurement

Diving in to the second-by-second measurement, we can see that our brains were well above the 40 score baseline when the logo was displayed toward the end of the ad.

This is masterful work by the brand - who ensures that moment is particularly memorable for the audience. That logo placement with high immersion will have a huge impact on brand recognition and recall.

Want to know more? Watch the full ad and second-by-second measurement.  

This second-by-second analysis is provided automatically by the platform for every ad you test. It evaluates your content and helps you iteratively improve ads for increased recall and recognition with your audience.

And an increase in immersion pays off! There is a strong correlation between immersion scores and sales. Over 20+ years of research, we now know that a 10 point increase in immersion leads to a 5% increase in sales. 

Key Moments

We can also use the automatic reporting tool to understand the key moments of immersion and indifference in the ad. Like we said before, the brain can be lazy - so low moments are bound to happen!

Immersion can help strategically place those moments at times when you are OK with your audience's brain checking out for a bit (AKA - not during the brand reveal or call to action!)

As we can see here with the Quorn ad, the low moment only lasted six seconds and occurred during a Drew-Chicken pillow fight - a fine time to let the audience tune out. 

Audience

Immersion provides an in-depth look into your audience to see where people were distributed across a variety of reactions to your content. And, while all results are 100% anonymized, you can target participants to understand various demographics (like vegans vs. meat eaters or Gen Z v. millennials) to understand who your ad impacted most. 

Here we can see that the majority of our audience was absorbed (40%) and we could use the tool to dig in more deeply to determine who those people were and where they were most immersed. 

Do you think your ad has what it takes to drive immersion? Test a piece of content free HERE or Sign Up for A Demo. 

Are you a science geek like us and you want to help us test brains' connection to content? Well then you are a PERFECT fit for The Brainiacs.

Join us to get a free app download and participate in measurements to help evaluate all kinds of content! We'd love to have you on the team.