We’re more than halfway through 2015, and it doesn’t quite feel like the future that classic scifi writers promised us. No settlements on Mars, no mutants, no aliens. Not even hoverboards!

One incredible advancement of the 21st century that no 20th century scifi writers were able to predict is social media advertising: a gigantic Web of interconnected devices across the world that allows any marketer with a couple of bucks and a couple of minutes to reach their exact target audience with custom-tailored messages.

The advantages of social media advertising in today’s media environment are clear: A larger and heavily segmented audience that is cheaper to reach with self-serve, programmatic buying. That is why so many brands and individuals are spending their marketing budget on social media – just this morning, for instance, I saw a promoted tweet from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal Twitter account talking about the new Terminator movie:

Granted, it probably wasn’t Arnold that set up and launched the ad. But still, how cool is that campaign? Arnold Schwarzenegger told me (and probably a few million others) personally this morning to go see his new movie, and the whole campaign probably cost a fraction of what a television commercial or billboard campaign would cost. Where is the downside?

Ironically, the one possible downside to social media advertising that I can think of is the central theme of my favorite Schwarzenegger movie: Total Recall. In it, double-agent Quaid must overcome implanted false memories to remember the real truth of his own identity and save the Martian day. It’ll be a roundabout explanation, but Quaid’s story in Total Recall is a fantastic lesson in digital marketing. “Open your mind to me,” and I’ll tell you how:

Memory is the biggest challenge and opportunity in social media

The goal of most marketing campaigns is to build brand awareness. More specifically, marketers want consumers to remember their brands when a specific need comes up – this is why you’ll always see billboards for coffee along heavy commuter highways. Office workers need coffee in the morning, and if they remember the Dunkin’ Donuts billboard after passing it in the morning they might choose to go to Dunkin’ Donuts after getting to their desk and seeing a pile of papers and thinking: “Need. Coffee.”

I have an out-of-the-blue question for you: Do you remember the last tweet you saw in your feed? Probably not. How about every tweet you’ve seen all day? I’m guessing the answer is no. In my case, I can’t remember any specific tweets I’ve seen in the last week, nor Facebook posts. There’s just too many!

And that’s the first problem: Social media is crowded, fast, and loud. There is an overabundance of content that moves by too quickly to make a meaningful impression on anyone’s short-term memory. The agency “Simply Zesty” put it well in their blog post, “Is social media damaging our memories?”:

To oversimplify things a bit, think of your short term memory as an empty glass and the internet and social media as extra water being poured into it. As you pour more and more water into it, the glass begins to overflow and the excess water spills outside the glass. In a sense, social media is this overflowing of information. If you’ve ever tried to take in the rapid influx of information from different social media streams, you’ll know that the majority of them are instantly forgotten about, your attention becoming selective as to what links or messages you check out. Many of these links are gone before we know it and therefore don’t register on your radar.

(Further reading on social media overcrowding our memory:)

“Is Social Media Shortening Our Attention Span?”

“Wait, what? On Social Network Use and Attention”

Overcrowding is an issue in other mediums than social media. There’s thousands of TV channels, millions of billboards, billions of junk mail catalogs. So “breaking through the clutter” is not an entirely unique issue to any digital marketing medium. What is unique is the “digital” part, and that might be a problem: Digital imagery and text is harder to remember than paper.

Here’s the proof: In Jan M. Noyes’ and Kate J. Garland’s paper, “Computer- vs paper-based tasks: Are they equivalent?”, the authors review over two dozen studies on the difference between reading speed, comprehension, and accuracy on computer screens or good ‘ol paper. Almost across the board, paper wins:

“reading was some 20 to 30% slower (in terms of proof-reading performance) from a computer screen than from paper”

“When considering reading accuracy, findings generally favoured paper.”

-“Belmore (1985), for example, concluded that information presented on video display terminals (VDTs) resulted in a poorer understanding by participants than information presented on paper”

“Askwall showed that there were differences in information searching between the two media with participants searching twice as much information in the paper-based condition (and understandably taking longer), while Weldon found that the problem was solved faster with the paper condition.”

To be fair to computers, these studies were all done before 1992, when there weren’t such things as Retina displays and e-ink screens. Even still, the fact remains that our brains make sense of screens much differently than paper, and that must have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of advertising on digital media. 

(Further reading on digital vs. paper:)

“You Won’t Remember This Article, Or Anything Else You Read Online”

“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age”

In a more recent study (from 1998) titled “Does Web Advertising Work? Memory For Print Vs. Online Media” the researchers set out to answer just that question. The test consisted of 48 subjects, half of which read the front page of a fictitious newspaper printed out on paper. The other half read the same front page on a computer screen. Every story and advertisement remained the same across both mediums. Here’s what they found:

“results from the analyses suggest that individuals exposed to news stories and ads in the print medium tend to remember (specifically, recognize) significantly more of the ad content than comparable individuals exposed to identical stories and ads in the online medium. There is no significant difference however on memory for story content between the two groups of individuals. Even when story memory and prior frequency of newspaper and online media are statistically controlled, memory for the print version of the ad is significantly higher than memory for the online version of the ad.”

Going back to the idea about building brand awareness, you might see the issue that memory can pose in social media advertising. If brands are using digital ads to build awareness, but human brains don’t remember advertisements on screens as accurately as paper, than is any money spent on a digital campaign really worth it in the long run? 

Here’s a study with some good news for digital marketers: “Are Unclicked Ads Wasted? Enduring Effects of Banner and Pop-Up Ad Exposures on Brand Memory and Attitudes” by Patrali Chatterjee. In it, the researcher conducts a test on the short-term and long-term effectiveness of pop-up ads in making consumers remember specific brands, as well as the effect on the consumer’s attitude of the brands. The test’s subjects were exposed to a mix of banner and pop-up ads while browsing a fake website, then asked to answer surveys that would measure brand recall, brand recognition, and brand attitude. Here are the results of the test:

And here are the hypotheses that were supported and rejected:

(On a side note: this study is a great resource for anyone that needs help convincing their marketing manager that “bigger isn’t always better” and that pop-up ads do a significant amount of harm to a brand’s image.) Anyway:

The main takeaway from this study is that “unclicked ads” do work in getting consumers to remember a brand, a point that has definitely been proven through real-world results but it’s always important to do the research.

(Further reading on digital marketing effects on brand awareness:)

“The Effects of Exposure Time on Memory of Display Advertisements”

“Is brand awareness a useful research measure in an era of digital marketing?”

To recap, because this post is getting out of hand: we have discussed the negative effect on memory that digital screens have, and the relative performance of different forms of digital media advertising (banners and pop-ups). None of the studies I have cited yet have focused on social media advertising, which is a completely different medium than classic display ads, because:

• User experience is a much higher consideration on social media websites, so the advertising allowed on these networks come with strict guidelines to limit overly distracting visuals and long text.

• Most social media advertising offerings mimic the look and style of user-generated content; that is, social media ads don’t have the prime real estate like top leaderboards or pop-ups do. Instead, they often blend in to the background of the site. On Twitter, for example, advertisements are portrayed as regular tweets within a user’s feed, which they can scroll by and ignore.

• Social media advertising is significantly more interactive than classic display advertising, such as banner ads. Instead of being a static picture, social media ads are usually rich content like articles or videos, and users can engage with these ads (like, share, comment) just like they can with user-created content.

For those reasons, social media advertisements should have a completely different effect than other digital advertisements on brand recognition, brand recall, and brand attitude. In an effort to test this hypothesis and legitimize their advertising platform, Facebook helped marketing researchers at Nielsen in 2010 conduct a large study titled: “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression”.

The study consisted of a long-term test of Facebook’s platform for building brand awareness. The test compared three different types of impressions: Homepage ads, homepage ads with “social context,” and organic impressions. Here is a screenshot from the study explaining these three types of advertisements:

These brand advertisements were served to over 800,000 Facebook users over the course of six months, with 70 brands involved and over 125 individual campaign. Here is how the test was administered:

A Facebook ad campaign is served to 99% of the users who fit the defined targeting parameters, while 1% of that audience is randomly assigned to serve as a control group. Only users who were within the target segment and would have been shown an ad during the course of the campaign (but were prevented from seeing that ad) are assigned to the control group. Twenty-four hours following ad exposure, a sample of both exposed and control users are served Nielsen BrandLift polls, and the impact of the ad campaign is measured.

And here are the relevant results for recall and awareness:

So, relative to the control group that did not see any ads that were part of the study, there is a significant and measurable increase in brand recall. Social media advertising works!

(Further reading on social media’s effect on brand awareness:)

“Like to Loyalty: A study on social media promotions and brand loyalty”

“Do social media marketing activies enhance customer equity?”

However, you probably noticed the darker blue bars in that graph. Those represent the influence of “organic exposure,” or, when a brand shows up in a user’s feed because their friend engaged with the brand somehow – i.e. “Sarah liked Old Navy’s Facebook Page.” In Nielsen’s test, organic impressions tripled ad recall and brand awareness, and quadrupled purchase intent.

The bad news is that you can’t directly buy organic exposure…that’s sort of the point. The good news is that this study was conducted in 2010, and Facebook’s ad platform has changed a lot since then to feature more “social advocacy,” which is what the study calls it when a Facebook ad includes info about how the user’s friends have engaged with a brand. The two major changes since 2010 on the Facebook Ad platform have been newsfeed ads, which mimic regular posts, and support for video.

In a more up-to-date study, Facebook partnered with Nielsen again to measure the effectiveness of their new video ad offerings. On a page titled “The Value of Video For Brands,” Facebook describes how Nielsen conducted the study:

To find out how video delivers value for brands, Nielsen analyzed data from 173 of their BrandEffect studies that included digital video ads on Facebook. Each study used a test-and-control design to measure the video’s impact on three ad campaign metrics: ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase consideration.

And here are the relevant results for ad recall and brand awareness:

Video ads have a significantly larger effect on all three customer equity values, creating longer-lasting recall, greater brand awareness, and greater purchase intent. That is probably why the marketing team for Terminator Genisys had Schwarzenegger upload this video to his official Page (or have someone else do it):

Like the Twitter Ad from the beginning of this post, this social media ad for the new Terminator movie is supposedly coming from Schwarzenegger himself. The ad is hitting the trifecta of “Social Recall”:

• Organic exposure: It was posted on Arnold’s personal Facebook Page, so it gets shared as regular content and the brand earns organic impressions.

• Social advocacy: Users seeing the video organically or through a paid promotion will see if their friends have engaged with the post.

• Video: the ad content type with the largest effect on ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent.

One final tip for increasing recall in your social media advertising comes from the classic Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall: Be direct. I’ll explain:

In the movie, Arnold’s character Quaid is constantly being manipulated by different groups through brainwashing and double-agents. In other words, indirect messages. Quaid constantly sees through these manipulations and the brainwashing turns out to be a complete waste of time. The one message that he does listen to comes from the lead mutant on Mars, Kuato, who simply tells him face-to-face, “Turn on the reactor.” No brainwashing, no double-agents, just a direct message.

The two ads for Terminator Genisys included in this post are a perfect example of how you can be direct with your social media advertising and achieve “Social Recall.” By utilizing Arnold’s personal accounts, there is added social advocacy and organic exposure. Companies can copy this technique in a number of ways, like having a company mascot account or using the CEO’s account. 

One more takeaway before this post finally ends: Social media advertisements don’t have to come from your brand as a whole, and it’s more in tune with the “social” part of social media if they don’t. It’s incredibly difficult to stand out and be remembered in the haze of social networks, but there’s endless opportunities in brand awareness for those that do.

Thanks for reading this long post, if you have any questions about improving the ad recall of your social media campaigns, let us know at Streetwise Studio and we’d be happy to help!