How marketers can harness the power of 'callbacks'

“You introduce something, seemingly move on from it, then bring it back in a way that changes the way viewers understand it,” he said.

This technique of reintroducing something familiar and enhancing it with a new interpretation is typical of various narrative forms, including film and stand-up comedy, where the viewer doesn’t have much agency, Winet said.

In these forms, creators guide viewers through an experience, and the callback technique signals to the audience that “they have a good experiential tour guide,” he said.

By setting up consumers to understand things in one way, then reshaping those things so they can be understood in another way, the creator tells the consumer, “‘I understand you. You can trust me. Enjoy the experience,’” Winet said.

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Do callbacks work?

To see if callbacks work in the real world, Winet studied their use in comedy — “the birthplace of the term ‘callback,’” he said (check some famous examples from the sitcom Seinfeld). 

In ongoing research, Winet and colleagues extracted more than 5,500 jokes from Netflix’s top 20 most popular comedy specials and measured how long the audience laughed and applauded after each joke.

They found that callback jokes significantly outperformed non-callback jokes, Winet said.

“People laughed more than twice as much at callback jokes. It was 8 seconds for callbacks and 3 seconds for non-callbacks,” he said. 

The researchers ran a similar study on the top 1,000 movies on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), trying to assess whether the use of callbacks translates into higher performance (for this study, they leveraged Chat GPT to generate a “callback score” for each movie). 

They found that movies with higher callback scores got higher ratings and, for every increase in callback score, movies made $77M more at the box office.

“So this tells us that callbacks might make entire experiences better,” Winet said. 

How callbacks add brand value

In another experiment, the researchers showed 17 TV commercials to 748 participants. Some ads were shown once, some twice, and some were callback ads, selected from the Energizer Bunny campaign. Like the Nasotine ad, these were shown in pairs: An Energizer Bunny commercial followed by a callback commercial — a seemingly unrelated ad disrupted by the arrival of the bunny.

To test which commercials were most memorable, the researchers gave participants a surprise memory test immediately after watching the ads, and a second test two weeks later. Initially, both repeated ads and the callback ads showed an advantage over ads shown only once.

However, after two weeks, the callback ads were remembered significantly more than the twice-shown ads, which by then performed no better than the single ads.

“Two weeks later, they still remembered the callback ads quite well, whereas the repeated ads were almost completely forgotten, to the point where it was no different from having seen the ad only once,” Winet said. 

“Callbacks caused people to remember a brand better over time,” he said.

Further experiments with jokes revealed that participants reported greater enjoyment from callback jokes compared with non-callback jokes. They also expressed a greater likelihood of sharing the experience with their friends. They key, Winet said, was that callbacks gave consumers the feeling of “being guided through the experience.”

In the context of brand experiences, this may translate into consumers feeling more positive about the brand and being more willing to pay for their products, he said.

“Callbacks improve consumer experiences by making them more memorable, more enjoyable, more meaningful, and more rewarding,” he said. “This can lead to better downstream marketing outcomes like higher star ratings and more sharing by word of mouth, while making experiences worth paying more for. Ultimately, this is all driven by consumers feeling understood and guided through the experience.”