Dear Goalhanger,
Thank you for reminding me of the power of the captive audience and the seductive nature of recency bias, fluency bias and the mere exposure effect (aka the familiarity principle).
As a binge-listener of The Rest is Politics and The Rest is History (and occasionally the others) whilst I’m at the gym or in the car, or doing DIY or a spot of garden maintenance, I am slap bang in the middle of the much-memed and much-derided centrist Dad persona. I know, I know. Yes and, as per Jimmy Carr:
So I am absolutely your Captive Audience. I am literally all ears. And when Dominic or Tom, or Alistair or Rory take me to one of your ads, I’m really listening. I’m not talking about one of those ads with a nice Irish lady with some funky zippy and boing-ing sound effects telling me that Shopify – is it? – is built for entrepreneurs like me. Those make me switch off pretty much immediately. I’m talking about the ads where Dominic or Tom, or Alistair or Rory are the one’s delivering the ad. I’ve been deeply engaged in what they’ve been saying for the past 20 minutes, so when they say the next thing, the ad thing, then I remain deeply engaged. I trust them, agreeably or disagreeably, sometimes more, sometimes less. But as all the content leading up to this point has been captivating, it’s no surprise that I’m captivated. So that’s the Captive Audience part. But what about recency bias, fluency bias and the mere exposure effect? Well it’s bit of a niche use-case, but I spend a pretty healthy chunk of my work life developing, building and writing Customer Value Propositions (CVPs). And your ads read like and sound like CVPS: Insight or Tension; Description; Benefits&Features / Features&Benefits; Sign-off and Call to Action. Of course there’s some additional humour and flourish in the interplay between Dominic or Tom, or Alistair or Rory. And Dominic’s mischievous tone in particular (nearly a parody, but not quite) in accepting the corporate dollar, is highly engaging to my ear at least.
So your ads, expressed as CVPs, are VERY familiar to me. They make perfect sense. They just sound right. Spot on in my book! Because, like everyone, I have a strong preference for things I have encountered recently (Recency bias / availability heuristic), I find them easier to process as they are familiar (fluency bias) and I like them more because I’ve been exposed to similar things in the past (mere exposure effect).
I’d love to know who writes these ads and how. Is it you? Is it the client? I don’t think it would be the presenters themselves? But maybe you give the client’s agencies a super-tight brief to write them in a common-format?
There does seem to be a pattern. Or am I imagining it?
And in another mildly niche and nerdily pleasing moment, not that long ago in qualitative research engagements we found ourselves constantly having to re-iterate to participants that the CVPs were not adverts. But here we are, with a captive audience and via the new-ish channel of ads delivered by the presenters of the podcast, it seems they are! Thanks again Goalhanger Ned