Neutrality, a total absence of feeling, is the most common audience response to advertising. Research from Adam Morgan, Peter Field and Jon Evans (The Extraordinary Cost of Dull) found that dull ads generate 58% lower prompted recall than emotionally engaging ones: the dullest OOH campaigns deliver barely 18.9% recall, versus nearly 30% for campaigns that spark feeling.
- 1 in 3 OOH campaigns fail to create any emotional connection or distinctiveness, and fail to shift brand recall at all.
- Positive emotions build 5% stronger brand associations; the top 20% happiest campaigns achieve 167% more key brand association lift than the dullest 20%.
- Campaigns creating above-average positive emotion drove a +9.4 percentage point lift in claimed key actions taken (26% vs 35%).
- Happiness and Surprise drive far greater memorability than neutral or negative emotional responses.
- Ads that leave viewers feeling positive drive a 52% increase in commercial action (conversion, store visit, website visit) versus 29% for ads that leave viewers feeling below-average.
“Showmanship” beats “salesmanship”: right-brain creative features — characters with vitality, dramatic scenes, sense of place, cultural references, humans and animals interacting — consistently outperform left-brain features like abstracted product shots, claims, data and figures, and heavy text. The most entertaining OOH creative earns +21% more attention than the least entertaining.
