Memorable Advertisments...Why?

In this lecture, we looked primarily at why certain advertisments are memorable for certain types of people and why.

The task was to look at a number of different advertisments and try to remember as many as possible, stating our first recalled advert first.

One of the main differences found between who remembered what, was gender differences. It seemed that males repeatedly recalled the adverts that provided humour, and it seemed that most of the adverts with the funny twist were aimed at males promoting products and services for men. The females however tended to remember the adverts with celebrity endorsements, adverts for products such as perfumes.

The advert for this Paco Rabanne fragrance, does not convey an extremely famous celebrity in their advert, (such as Beyonce beinf the face of Tommy Hilfiger's True Star) but it does draw your attention to the advert through other means.

Adverts that successfully use colour in their adverts can really catch your eye if contrasting is used effectively. The advert shown here has immediatly made the perfume stand out in the foreground by using the neon streaks of purple to intensify the name of the product. Because the rest of the advert is black and grey, this purple streak really amplifys the product being presented.

The senses are also used widely in advertising. Visual and touch are the two senses that most stand out in the paco rabanne advert, and this applies to many other adverts. It is strange however to notice that the sense of smell isn't addressed in perfume adverts, a sense that is vital to the success of perfumes and aftershaves.

A link was also found between the amount of analysis an advert required to understand the product being promoted. It seemed the more complicated the advert's underlying message, the less less likely the males remembered them.

There is also a theory on the primary and recency effect. This theory suggests that women would tend to remember the first advert they see whereas the men are more likely to remember the last advert they see. This theory is applicable to many other visual tests as well as the intake of words or knowledge etc.