The Perfect Christmas Ad? These Are the Brain Laws of 5 Years of Neuromarketing Research
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It is a regular fixture in the end of year period every year: Christmas commercials. The snow, peaks and Christmas tunes fly around your ears.
What exactly makes a good Christmas commercial ? Which advertising techniques appeal to our brain? Based on more than 100 tested Christmas commercials, Unravel has plenty of insights into which ingredients work well and which don’t. In this blog, we list the 5 core principles of effective Christmas commercials.
The brain loves stories
Christmas is a reason for many brands to go all out. Commercials are often narrative and may also last a bit longer than the usual commercial length (to what extent that is effective you can read later in this blog). Many supermarkets and lotteries end the year with a story.
In terms of creative approach, narrative commercials indeed prove to be an effective strategy. Both for commercials in general and for Christmas commercials in particular, it is true that they evoke significantly more engagement in the brain. Advertisers also feel this intuitively: storylines are the carriers of attention and emotion.
Firstly, this is strongly related to memory formation, and thus increases the chance that one will remember the commercial later. An interesting side effect is that commercials with a lot list of poland consumer email of engagement in the brain encourage engagement in real life: they are talked about more, both online and offline. Beneficial for brands that want to leave an indelible impression.
Being unique is difficult, but essential
However, a story-driven commercial alone is not enough. Because although expressions with a storyline generally have an advantage over their more informative counterparts, the how to organize promotional actions in shopping centers during effectiveness can vary considerably. If we look at the top 20 every year, the three winners are always story-driven, but there are also regularly narrative commercials dangling at the bottom of the list.
How is that possible? Many stories are not unique. They are yet another retelling of the lonely person who is unexpectedly warmly welcomed by a concerned neighbor or family member at alb directory Christmas. There is simply no mental hook for the brain to give the expression a unique place.
A storyline needs unique environments, objects and/or characters. This makes it easy for the brain to remember the story, without commercials getting tangled in a jumble of questionable quality.
The king of the sensational storyline is the Staatsloterij. Although their stories can often be summarized simply and concisely, they invariably contain unique characters (such as the black lucky kitten Frummel in 2021), objects (such as the malfunctioning Cuckoo Clock in 2022) and environments (such as the adventurous journey to the Northern Lights that father and son made in 2023). Seemingly simple fare, but always unique, fascinating and therefore perfect food for our brains.