The Power of a Penguin

Back in early 2019 British Gas wanted to understand the impact of including Wilbur the Penguin in their digital display advertising.

So research agency Lumen created two test banner ads (see below), one with their mascot Penguin (Wilbur) and one without.

They then ran the ads through user testing and created a heat map for each one.

As you can tell from the clips above the results were that the ad that featured the Penguin character, Wilbur, led to an 80% increase in visual salience and effective reach of the campaign.

This simple experiment just goes to show the power of emotional stimuli.

This is why adverts have so much success with babies, puppies and kittens, and why ‘clickbait’-style headlines (“What happened will SHOCK you!”) are so effective.

We are hardwired to pay more attention to emotional things.