How Does Personification Impact Ad Performance and Empathy? An Experiment with Online Advertising

Abstract

This research explores the value of personas for supporting professional advertisers to design adverts for social media. We test if a personified user group (PUG), when provided to online ad designers, results in better ad performance than when using a non-personified user group (NUG) that had no face picture or name. Our experiment has 30 participants that created Facebook ads using both PUG and NUG. We found that using PUG did increase advertising click performance of ads created by people who are more experienced with ads and personas. Moreover, an analysis of the ad texts showed that the use of PUG increased the empathy of the created ads, supporting the foundational empathy benefit cited in HCI literature. However, the use of PUG did not significantly increase purchase intent. The results imply that using PUG for online ad design evokes more empathy and improves click-through performance. More empathetic ads can have a positive impact on social media users, given that they appear to increase relevance.