How many cognitive biases does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Advertising, Memory and the Generation Effect

Why do we love puzzles?

Why do millions of people head to the New York Times to play Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee and Strands every day? Why do we spend hours engrossed in crosswords, sudokus or jigsaw puzzles? Why do we care how a farmer might get a sheep, a wolf and a sack of cabbage across a river without the sheep eating the cabbage or the wolf devouring the sheep?

Okay, but what does this have to do with marketing? Ooh! Excellent question. Here’s the answer: Ads that force audience participation are more memorable, which means they’re more effective.

For example, what’s going on here?

This ad works for all the reasons you think it might and one you might not: 

1. It’s perfectly coded — the ad features The Economist’s distinctive colors, font and logo. 
2. It’s surprising, so it has stopping power. 
3. It’s part of a larger, wickedly brilliant and ongoing fame campaign to get people talking, sharing and subscribing. 
4. It’s more memorable because of a cognitive bias called the Generation Effect. 

The generation effect (nothing to do with Millennials, Boomers or Gen Z) was first discovered back in the 1970s by researchers Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf of the University of Toronto. They recruited undergrads, divided them into two groups and gave each subject a list of word pairs. 

Subjects in the first group got the “Read” list. The word pairs on this list were complete. All they had to do was read them. 

Subjects in the second group got the “Generate” list. Their words were missing letters, and they had to generate the answer by filling in the blanks. So if one of the word pairs was “grey elephant,” it might show up on the list as “grey elep_ant.”

Then Slamecka and Graf asked their subjects to recall as many of the word pairs as they could. Which group do you think did better? 

According to their 1978 paper, “Performance in the generate condition was superior to that in the read condition. This held for measures of cued and uncued recognition, free and cued recall, and confidence ratings. The phenomenon persisted across variations in encoding rules, timed or self-paced presentation, presence or absence of test information, and between- or within-subjects designs.”

In other, fewer words, people who had to do a bit of thinking remembered more of the words on the list. 

In 2020, marketing researchers Richard Shotton and Mike Treharne wanted to test the generation effect for themselves, so they asked 415 people to read a list of brands in five categories — cars, banking, beauty, electronics and supermarkets.

Again, one group of subjects was shown the complete brand name (Audi, for example). The other group had to puzzle it out by filling in the blank (Au_i). 

Shotton and Treharne found that people were 14% better at remembering brand names when they had to do a little extra cognitive processing. 

As Richard Shotton put it in his book “The Illusion of Choice”, “The cognitive effort involved in generating the answer makes the information stickier.” 

But the generation effect doesn’t just apply to puzzles. It also works with puns and other wordplay and visual jokes. 

Here’s another Economist ad, one of my all time favorites …

What chamber am I trapped in, and how am I getting out? Oh, the echo chamber and The Economist. If I was trapped in the 36 chambers, I would need the Wu-Tang Clan. 

These ads are more memorable and more effective because you have to work a little bit to figure them out. “Solving” these ads closes the information gap of curiosity, and anyone who bothers to figure them out is rewarded with a quick hit of dopamine.

Why does any of this matter?

You might be thinking, “Okay, that’s cute, but Economist readers are smart, highly-successful, highly-driven people who enjoy reading. I just want my message out there.” 

Fair point, but marketing is a memory game. To win, you need to grab people’s attention and hold it long enough to get your brand into the minds of your audience. And you need to do it over and over and over again. 

We can do that with long-term, emotional advertising built around category entry points. We can also use puzzles, visual puns, wordplay and jokes … built around category entry points. 

And what’s the category entry point in these Economist ads? It’s something like “When you want to be part of the smarter set — the valued, the included, the admired — the Economist is the magazine for you.” But that’s not as concrete (or as fun) as …

There’s a lot going on with this headline — irony, dry humor, an appeal to status. We have to work a little bit to get the joke, which makes it more memorable.

The other thing — and this goes back to our very human love of puzzles — is that every ad in this campaign is an entertaining little treat. 

What’s their next ad going to be? Obviously no one sits around waiting for the next Economist ad to drop, but they’re not frantically scrambling for the ‘skip ad’ button either. Yes, not everyone is going to get it, but not everyone is going to subscribe to The Economist. 

When confronted with the unexpected, the human brain craves certainty. We’re hardwired to resolve the tension between what we know and what we don’t. 

Do your ads have the ability to slip out of people’s minds unnoticed? We can help. We’ll see you next time. 

Also, the answer to the TL;DR Dispatch riddle is “a keyboard.” 

Sources!

1. The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon – Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf
2. The Illusion of Choice: 16 ½ psychological biases that influence what we buy – Richard Shotton 
3. The Economist – Ads of the World