TV screens in the living room drive the highest advertising recall, according to "The Context Effects" study, which Map The Territory and Tapestry Research carried out for Thinkbox to examine the key factors influencing in-home video advertising performance. The study found that television screens drove 60% more recall than ads seen on a smartphone or tablet and 34% more than those seen on a computer.
The study found that people are 44% more likely to trust advertising seen within a professional context and 34% more likely to find it entertaining. In addition, it revealed that the right in-home advertising can increase recall by up to 6.3 times. According to the research, the living room was the best spot for this and was 22% better than all other rooms in the house for driving advertising recall. Overall, the living room was 176% better than the kitchen at driving advertising recall and 10% better than the bedroom.
The living room is used overwhelmingly to watch professionally produced content on a TV set, with this accounting for 80.2% of living room video viewing. Only 5.1% of living room viewing is non-professional video content watched on the TV set – for example, user-generated content uploaded to YouTube. The remainder is other uses of TV sets, for example, gaming. The study discovered that ad recall is much higher for occasions involving professionally produced content compared with non-professional content, with 60% higher ad recall for professional content vs. non-professional content. People are also 44% more likely to trust an advert seen with professional content and 39% more likely to find the advertising entertaining.
The study also found that ad recall increased by 23% when it was watched with others, for instance, while watching television dramas, underlining the impact of shared environments. The findings highlight that, despite a slump in broadcast advertising, TV should remain a vital part of advertisers' strategies.
Thinkbox research and planning director Matt Hill said: "TV is the social medium. It brings people together and gets ads talked about. Every night, there are nearly 5 million conversations about the ads on commercial TV. Great planners have long argued the case for the power of context, and this study is proof that it really does make a huge difference – even room to room."
Map the Territory co-founder Andy Davidson said: "To understand why advertising is so effective in the living room, you need to understand why people are there. We learned that people don't only gather to watch TV; they also watch TV to gather. In this context, all shared content, from the hot new drama to a regular video ad, is working in the higher service of bringing that household a little closer together."