Google Totally Tricked Viewers Into Thinking They Were Clicking On A Real Pizza Ad — Here’s Why

Pizza will get anyone’s attention. Just thinking about melted cheese and hot pepperoni is enough to make you lose focus at work. That’s likely why Google chose pizza as the subject in an ad that actually wasn’t about pizza at all. Sounds confusing, but here’s what went down.

Google and their Unskippable Labs team wanted to study the effects that ads have on their viewers. The best way to do this, of course, was to create an ad that would make people tune in. So they made up a brand called Doctor Fork (which is an amazing name) and created 33 different ads using stock footage. Airing the ads on YouTube allowed them to get 20 million interactions from viewers. But why the fake brand? Well, in advertising a product that didn’t exist, Google had the freedom to try new methods in advertising that wouldn’t hurt an actual brand had they backfired.

They were testing two big components. One, they were looking at sensory cues on ad effectiveness. Secondly, they tested the “man versus food” theory. That is, do viewers really need to see someone else enjoying a product to gain interest? Does having a person in the ad at all make a big difference?

Here’s what they learned. For one, ads with multiple sensory cues did way better. Their audience preferred ads that combined audio, video, and even text cues to create an overall experience. People no longer just need the standard “bite and smile” shot to prove something is delicious.

Up-close shots of the pizza also scored quite well. But that’s not too much of a surprise.

The age range of their audience was also considered. Younger people preferred a first-person perspective on the ads, while the older generation didn’t really connect with the Doctor Fork ads that used this tactic.

“The findings from the large scale YouTube experiments led to very fruitful brainstorming with the agencies and brand teams,” Dr. Ryan Elder, associate professor of marketing at Brigham Young University, said in an email to TechCrunch. Dr. Elder worked on the study, and also has a background in sensory cues in advertising.

If you caught a Doctor Fork ad on YouTube, just know that your eyes unknowingly helped ads become more effective.

If this article has got you craving pizza, we’ve got your back with a pizza pretzel recipe.

And don’t worry, it’s the real deal!