The Cocktail Party Effect: Secret Ingredient for Successful Ads
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Last week I was scrolling through Instagram. I stopped at a good ad. Now I am a marketer and therefore more than average interested in ads, but this one had something extra. It was the application of the Cocktail Party Effect that caught my attention.
What was wrong with this ad? It wasn’t particularly well-made, it was a simple static image. Also, it was an ad for a gym, a place I avoid with love. So I didn’t ‘go’ on that, but on what?
The Cocktail Party Effect
The application of the Cocktail Party Effect was the answer… The Cocktail Party Effect is an effective influencing technique, first described by British psychologist Colin Cherry in the 1950s. He was talking to someone at a party and heard his name mentioned a little further away. You probably recognize it, from that moment on he was only focused on the conversation that was taking place there…
The Cocktail Party Effect is when you can focus on a particular sound, word, or conversation even when there is a lot of noise around you. We can filter out important information from the chaos and focus on what we want to hear, like someone’s voice.
Cocktail Party Effect at ‘my’ gym
Smart marketers and communication professionals also regularly apply the Cocktail Party Effect. For example, in online advertisements, on traffic fines, in outdoor signing and even on Coke bottles.
In the case of my example: the gym. The advertisement said ‘Assen’, my hometown. Because I see my own hometown appear in my timeline, I suddenly perk up. I am ‘recognized/acknowledged’. Someone knows that I exist and that I live in Assen. I pay extra attention: the Cocktail Party Effect.
Richard Shotton also mentions a nice example of the effect in saint kitts and nevis email list 10828 contact leads his book The Choice Factory. The blood bank called on people to become blood donors via billboards. In a second variant, one thing was changed: the name of the city was added, something like the example below:
We need your blood
London, we need your blood
Option two provided a 10% improvement in cost per donation
How specific can you make the Cocktail Party Effect?
You would say: the more personalized, the better. So names, how can companies combat information overload and help potential customers? house numbers, hair color, everything. However, that is not always the most successful, according to a study that media company Mediacom did on the Cocktail Party Effect. They tested billboards with the names of regions, cities and neighborhoods, ao lists assuming that the neighborhood names would score best in terms of sales.
It turned out that the region and city names scored well, but the district names did not. The region name resulted in 8% more sales. The city name resulted in 9% more sales. But the district name was a lot less effective: only 1% more sales.
Also read: The Marketing Psychology of Coca-Cola
It probably also has to do with the connection that most people feel with their living environment. One person feels more connected to a place name, another to a region and yet another has a strong feeling for the neighbourhood or even the street.