How to Make Advertising on Social Media Memorable: Stand Out or Get Lost

This study evaluates the visual salience of static social media ads shown in-feed, identifying the best performing combinations of text- vs. image-based ad creative to different types of visual brand elements. Two online experiments show that image-based ad creative outperforms text-based, gaining higher ad recall, and text-based ad creative reduce correct brand recall. There was also evidence that counterprogramming ad creative type to the type of visual brand elements can overcome some of the disadvantages of text-based ad creative, particularly amongst a brand’s non-buyers and for larger brands. These findings provide insights on how to achieve ad and brand memorability in social media advertising.