"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is not the Best Ad Writing Technique

Ad copy writers are always told to use simple language. However, a study completed at Kansas State University shows complex wording in advertisements can actually improve a person's memory of the ad.

Bob Meeds, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications, with a former K-State graduate student Samuel Bradley, now a doctoral student at Indiana University, spent nearly a year studying syntax, or how words are arranged in a sentence in advertisements.

The results of the experiment were different than conventional wisdom would suggest, Meeds said. He said people tended to remember more information from ads when sentence structure was more complex.

For the study, Meeds and Bradley "looked at the structure and order of words." In order to do this, they first wrote their own billboard advertisements and slogans for fictitious products in the simplest sentence form in English, which is subject-verb-adverb-object. "The man walked slowly home" is an example.

By changing the sentence and placing the adverb at the end of the sentence -- "the man walked home slowly" -- the sentence sounds more conversational and has a more complex structure, Meeds said.

Meeds gave an example of how the ads were written for the study. Take the sentence for a fictitious water filter, " Evpure proudly guarantees each drop" as an example. Meeds reworded the sentence to say, "Evpure guarantees each drop proudly," or "Each drop is proudly guaranteed by Evpure" or "Each drop is guaranteed by Evpure proudly." The reworded sentences take longer for a person to process because the basic sentence structure is manipulated.

Testing for ad memory was done through "a simple kind of language exposure," Meeds said. Participants read six ads only four of which were important. Next they were asked to watch ten minutes of a movie "to let participants' memories decay." Meeds said the participants understood all of the ads well under all of his conditions.

He next had participants write down the ads from memory. He found that participants remembered more information if there was one transformation to the sentence structure, probably because they had to concentrate on the structure more.

"This was a micro-level look at how people process words," said Meeds.

Meeds conducted an earlier, related study of the use of technical language in advertising. "In that study, we found people learned more about a product when the ad used more technical language and context," he said.

The study was done using magazine advertisements for products like a VCR and an inkjet printer. He used technical terms from the owner's manuals, which can be confusing to some people.

Meeds said people learn new words in stages. One stage is learning a word by its context. Sometimes a word can't be learned this way, however, because there aren't always familiar words surrounding the new word to help explain what the new word means. This can make technical ads very difficult for some people to understand.

Even though the results of the recent syntax researchcontradict current ideas about how to write ad copy, Meeds said the findings are limited to informational advertising and might be useful to make minor changes in that form. Other types of ads are designed for purposes beyond the scope of this research project.

Prepaed by Angela Badger Hometown: Carbondale, Kansas

Source: Dr. Bob Meeds