Getting carried away: Understanding memory and consumer processing of perceived storytelling in advertisements

Advertisers have increasingly utilized storytelling techniques in advertising creative development as they try to enhance engagement and memory for their brands. Yet, there is still the need to better understand implications of this approach. Does storytelling in advertising distract viewers from remembering important brand elements or does storytelling enhance brand measures as desired by advertisers? Three pilot studies were conducted to identify consumer perception of storytelling levels in ads and enable the researcher to delineate between high, medium and low story ad messages. Two product categories were identified for evaluation-the automobile and financial services industries. In the final study, subjects viewed these three levels of commercials in each industry and answered both open-ended and close ended questions to understand how well they remembered, processed, liked and would potentially act upon the ads they viewed.; Results indicated that in the automobile category, there does appear to be differences between perceived level of story and selected dependent measures. In particular, memory trade-offs were found as high level story ads garnered higher levels of ad context vs. ad content memory. Self-referencing processing measures as well as likability and ad-induced brand interest also increased by level of story in the ad. The financial services category did not garner as predictive of results. There were some expected memory implications by story level, but no implications for processing, likeability, or ad-induced brand interest. Either the industry was not relevant enough to subjects or perhaps the particular ads chosen were not clear enough in story level delineation to generate predicted story level response. In general, however, story level does seem to be a relevant creative technique to identify and study. In the automobile category, as predicted, ad memory, self-referencing, and likeability measures garnered higher levels of response when there were higher levels of story in the ad message. This study indicated that perceived high story level in ads do distract from important brand measures.