“‘Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?’ ‘The same thing we do every night, Pinky—take over the world!’” echoes out, barely audible, from the television. It’s just after 7a.m. on a Sunday morning. Everyone else in the house is still sleeping, but I’m sitting with a cup of tea, watching cartoons and continuing a decades-old ritual. Maybe it’s a childish diversion, a nostalgic indulgence, or a clear symptom of Peter-Pan syndrome. I don’t know, but it happens every Sunday. Adults like me aren’t supposed to like cartoons, but we do; The Simpsons, Sponge Bob and South Park attest to that. That gap between what adults are supposed to like and what we actually like is where things get interesting.
This is why I was interested in two researchers who investigated the role of cartoons in advertising targeted at adults. Cartoons in advertising are nothing new, but they’ve mainly been aimed at children. Research into how cartoons affect adults is almost nonexistent.
Would cartoons in ads annoy adults, or disarm them? To find out, researchers created two versions of ads—one with a cartoon, one without—for different types of products. Some were low involvement products (facial tissues, mouthwash), things you grab without thinking. Others were high involvement products (laptops, acne cream), things you actually research before buying. For each of these advertisements, participants were asked questions that would reveal their comprehension, recall, credibility, and attitudes towards each brand. Surprisingly, the cartoons did not improve the scores for the low involvement products, which people tend to buy without too much consideration; they did increase the scores for the high involvement products, which people tend to look at in much more detail.
Why this happens is unclear, but it is possible that for high involvement, often serious products, the unexpected presence of a cartoon prevents the automatic judgment of that product and forces people to consider its features and benefits on its own merits. In other words, if Pinky and the Brain were to focus their efforts on selling high involvement products like insurance, they could conquer the world in no time at all, provided the Geico Gecko doesn’t get there first.