FEBRUARY 20, 2006
Surprise Engagement
Want to break through ad clutter? Try the unexpected
By Bill Harvey

Although the concept has been around for years, there is renewed talk these days of how well advertising "engages" audiences. And for good reason. Never before in history have audiences been so fragmented and advertisers faced a wider array of methods and media to try and reach them. Part of the renewed discussion about engagement is what methods and which media do a better job of grabbing and holding the attention of audiences. I am coming to the conclusion that surprise is a driving factor today in achieving engagement.

The typical consumer is screening out advertising on purpose. We're all doing it-it's a survival method. If we paid attention to every ad or offer aimed at us each day, we'd never get anything done. There are simply too many ads creating a huge amount of clutter, both physically and mentally. Surprise is something that breaks though this clutter, like seeing an ad-for something you are actually in the market for-in an unexpected place.

Surprise breaks through because of peripheral apperception. Something in the fringes of our perceptual field that doesn't fit our brain's modeled expectation of the environment trips a switch and gets our attention. Brainwave work by Dr. Immanuel Donchin and others has established that a particular brainwave pattern called the P300 is the brain signature of conscious noticing of surprising material. My bet is that certain advertising approaches benefit from these P300 waves. Surprise becomes the door through which engagement comes.

We saw this in a series of 30 studies for major companies measuring the effects of their Internet sponsorships of Studio One Networks content. These were true sponsorships where "brought to you by" was the only "ad message." It's my opinion that this "unconditional gift" approach surprised consumers. I would venture to guess that many consumers felt the advertiser had respected them to an unusual degree and so had earned a second look for his/her products. Across the 30 studies, the average purchase-intent lift was about 30 percent, more than seven times the comparable metric for the average TV commercial.

We saw what we interpret to be the importance of surprise again in a recent series of analyses of Internet behavioral targeting data from Tacoda, Revenue Science, Advertising.com, 24/7 and others. We compared clickthrough rates, advertising awareness, purchase intent, ROI and other metrics between behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. Every theory of advertising in history would say that contextual targeting has to always beat behavioral targeting (if you leave out media cost as a factor). This is because selling golf balls on a golf page has to beat selling golf balls on any other page. Except that this is not true. Every provider showed cases where behavioral targeting won. It's my opinion that behavioral won partly because of surprise. When the consumer sees an ad for something she or he has been shopping for lately, but sees it in a context where she/he doesn't expect to see it, it grabs more attention than when the same ad is seen in a predictable environment.

We measured three behavioral campaigns recently where we used eye tracking to analyze what was happening in behavioral versus contextual. The eye camera found 17 percent more engagement for behavioral over contextual (in terms of number of looks at the ad). Interestingly, the advantage over contextual climbed to 54 percent after the first exposure. In other words, the P300 response does not wear out as rapidly as average ad interest does, so surprise keeps grabbing the eye for the same ad if it's seen again and again in surprising places.

I am not alone in finding surprise to be a key engagement factor. The Advertising Research Foundation's chief research officer, Joe Plummer, head of the MI4 Engagement Committee, now cites surprise as one of three drivers of engagement. The other two drivers Plummer says are utility/relevancy (reaching true targets) and emotive bonding (not, for example, surprising people with offensive material, but with something they like). The one we have the most to learn about may be the one we don't usually think about, namely, surprise.