Brand characters boost the effectiveness of TV ads

Stephen Whiteside

System1, the research firm, assessed thousands of television ads to determine if the presence of a brand character yielded an improvement in performance.

Ronald McDonald. Tony the Tiger. Mr Peanut. The Aflac Duck.

Each of these iconic characters has come to represent their parent brand – McDonald’s restaurants, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, Planters peanuts and Aflac insurance, respectively – for millions of consumers in the United States. But does their presence increase the effectiveness of TV advertising?

System1 – a UK-based global research firm that was known as BrainJuicer until 2017, and today boasts 13 offices in nine markets, including four locations in the US – set out to answer this question by analyzing 13,423 traditional television commercials that aired in 2018.

These...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands