Brands assets come in various forms but it is those visual assets owned by the brand itself that are most likely to be strongly linked to ‘effective branded attention’ in creative, new research suggests.

In The Power of You, research company Ipsos outlines the results of a meta-analysis of over 2,000 (US) pieces of video creative, examining the relationship between effectiveness and the presence or not of brand assets – which included colours, logos, characters, celebrities, audio devices and music, and scents/tastes when using the brand or product.

The most widely used brand assets in this exercise were logos (appearing in 91% of ads), colours (69%) and slogans (45%); given video ads were examined it’s not surprising that visual assets of one sort or another appeared in 92% of these, audio assets appeared in only 8%.

And the use of brand assets was seen to be more effective than just showing or talking about the brand.

“When we compare high vs. low performing creative we see little difference in the frequency of brand mentions or display, but with brand assets, high performing creative showed them on average +34% more often,” the report said.

More specifically, one of the report’s conclusions is that brand assets that leverage ‘the power of you’, such as characters and sonic brand cues, are more effective than assets that are leveraged from wider culture, such as celebrities and music.

“If people often don’t care if a majority of brands would cease to exist, then the role of great creative is to keep the brand in mind, by creating and refreshing mental networks,” the report noted.

“It’s in the use of visual brand assets that we see this in action, with the presence of assets most likely to be owned by the brand most strongly linked to effective branded attention.”

Ads that used characters, in particular, were 6x more likely to be in the high-performing tercile.

Sourced from WARC