You can use the power of callbacks to improve your marketing… and to be funnier.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, in comedy callbacks describe a joke which refers back to one told earlier in the set. By reminding the audience of the previous reference, the comic gets more than one laugh from a single joke. If this happens over and over again, it’s called a running gag.
In television, callbacks were relatively rare when episodes dropped weekly because networks wanted viewers to be able to understand what was going on in any episode without having seen previous shows. In addition, TV shows in which the episodes were self-contained and could be rerun in any order were more valuable in syndication than ones which had to be run in sequence. The hit series Seinfeld broke with tradition and frequently used callbacks. One of my favorite examples is George Constanza getting caught double dipping and then defending it again a few episodes later.
In marketing, the best example of the power of callbacks might be the Energizer Bunny ads in which a pink, drumming rabbit always outlasts its peers thanks to the superior power of its battery. While the Energizer Bunny ads became memorable partially due to how frequently they ran over many years, the true genius of the campaign happened when the bunny appeared in seemingly unrelated commercials. For example, the bunny unexpectedly becomes the focus of this ad for the fictitious Nasotine sinus relief nasal spray. It’s a callback to the regular ads.
Duke researchers were able to quantify the power of callbacks. In one experiment, they analyzed how long the audience laughed and applauded after 500 jokes from Netflix’s top 20 most popular comedy specials. They found “it was 8 seconds for callbacks and 3 seconds for non-callbacks [jokes].” Similarly, the researchers found movies with higher callback scores got higher ratings and made an average of $77M more at the box office. In another experiment, the researchers showed regular ads to participants either once or twice, and callback ads only once. After two weeks, “the callback ads were remembered significantly more than the twice-shown ads, which performed no better than the single ads.”
The lesson to all of us is fairly straightforward if we want to make something memorable. It’s not just that repetition is your friend but we should present the information in lots of different ways over an extended period of time. By constantly referring back to the original, we increase the probability that it will be remembered.
That’s the power of callbacks.
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