Standing Out or Fitting in? Memory Effects of Ad Typicality Depend on Exposure Duration

Advertisers want to create memorable ads and brands. Developing ads that stand out from the crowd of other ads – that are “atypical” – is commonly believed to be an effective strategy to accomplish memorability (Goodstein 1993; Smith et al. 2007). Atypical ads are dissimilar from other ad exemplars in the advertised category, which makes them stand out more. Typical ads are similar to the prototype of the advertised category and hence to other ads for the same type of product, which should make them less memorable, is the general idea. The present research contests this idea. It aims to reconcile competing theories on the memory effects of atypicality by introducing exposure duration as a crucial moderator. In practice, attention to ads is usually short, ranging from a brief glance up to a few seconds at most (Pieters and Wedel 2004). Yet, memory effects are often tested after surprisingly long ad exposures of up to 30 seconds (Heckler and Childers 1992; Lee and Ang 2003). Therefore, the question remains largely unanswered whether atypical ads are more effective than typical ads across the short exposure durations common in real-life. In fact, there is reason to believe that the effects of atypicality are qualitatively different at different points in time during exposure, even during such short durations. Furthermore, although it is acknowledged that recall and recognition represent different memory processes (Krishnan and Chakravarti 1999), they seem to be used more or less interchangeably in ad research as indicators of memory strength. This research shows that recall and recognition are determined by ad typicality, contingent on exposure duration, but in very diverse ways.