Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills @thomhills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

A glass and a half full of joy


This advertisement by Cadbury in 2007 was launched to promote Cadbury dairy milk brand chocolate after a series of public relation blunders and product recalls. It quickly became one of the most talked about advertisements of the year. The gorilla advertisement didn't follow cliché  advertising techniques and it didn't target a specific audience. Instead it established connections between random viewers from all over the world and gave them something to talk about. This was done though word of mouth and social networking sites. the advert was uploaded to YouTube where it received 500,000 views in its first week. This is an example of extreme viral marketing, a technique that uses pre-existing social networks and technologies to increase brand awareness.

The advert also uses a song by Phill Colllins - 'In the air tonight' which is a well known hit from the 80s. Familiar music has been found to increase the memorability of an advert, as shown by Alexomanolaki et al, in  their 2006 study whereby music proved to reinforce the perception of the advert for both musicians and non musicians. Due to the adverts randomness it is seen to be quite funny, a review by Marc Weinberger and Charles Gulas (1992) stated that humour attracts attention, does not harm comprehension, increases liking and can increase persuasion making it an effective advertising technique. 


Alexomanolaki, M., Loveday, C., & Kennettt C. (2006). Music and memory in advertising; music as a device of implicit learning and recall, ICMPC-ESCOM, pp. 1190-1198.

Weinberger, M., G. & Gulas, C., S. (1992). The impact of humor in advertising: A review. Journal of Advertising, 21, 4.




1 comment:

  1. This is a strange little ad. Can you say a bit more about the how either or the studies were done?

    ReplyDelete

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