What benefits do low clutter environments on social media offer?
Richard Shotton
Author of The Choice Factory and founder of Astroten, a consultancy that applies findings from behavioural science to improve marketing.
This year has seen a flurry of social media ad developments with Instagram dropping their minimum spend requirements and Snapchat releasing Discover. It surely won’t be long before Pinterest offers advertising in the UK, just as they do in the US. But, despite these developments, most ad spend still goes on the two established players, Facebook and Twitter. Are advertisers right to focus there?
Perhaps not. After all, Instagram and Snapchat have the advantage of being relatively ad free. In August Ad Age revealed that Discover ran just one ad for every 44 stories.
This lack of clutter should attract advertisers as there’s plenty of offline evidence that it boosts ad recall. For example, ZenithOptimedia recently ran an audio clutter experiment among 750 consumers. We played a car ad either on its own or in a break of three or six ads. Consumers who listened to the stand-alone ad were a third more likely to recall details, such as the price, than those who listened to the longest ad break.
What’s true for audio is true for social media.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute proved this with a recent experiment amongst 200 Australians. The participants logged onto Facebook and used it as they normally would, for ten minutes, while software monitored the ads that appeared.
After the session, the participants’ ad recall was compared to what they had been exposed to. The key finding was that in a low clutter session, where they saw 13 ads, the proportion of ads recalled was 78% higher than in a high-clutter session, when they saw 30 ads. The impact on small brands was even higher. Just as in other media, too many ads overload a consumer’s capacity to remember them.
These laboratory findings are backed up by tracking data from Nielsen, who found that recall uplift levels for ads on Instagram are three and a half times higher than their benchmarks.
But how long will Instagram and Snapchat stay uncluttered? It’s likely that advertisers have a short window of opportunity. It may well be that in a year’s time, in the words of baseball legend, Yogi Berra, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
@rshotton
First published on the Wall blog: https://wallblog.co.uk/2015/10/20/is-there-clutter-on-social-media/#ixzz3pCdP2PRy