How Vueling use a familiarity heuristic to land a eyecatching ad

Vueling's digital OOH borrows something from the MacOS, which is a great tactic to repeat in paid social.

I saw this Vueling ad last week and actually took notice of it.

Why? That yellow box in the middle of the ad. For the one-in-seven people in the UK who own Macs or the 40% who own iPhones, they’ll recognise that yellow box as the brightness control in MacOS.

Here they minimal grey has been supplanted by warm Vueling yellow.

This felt compelling when I saw it. It felt clever. Not clever in a Snow Plough kind of way, but still it made me smile.

This format works well on paid social

Making out of home feel more digital isn’t anything new. There’s been variants on digital-feeling ads in ooh environments for years.

But what we’ve seen work progressively well over the last couple of years, is ads which borrow features from other digital platforms.

This could mean borrowing the layout from your favourite messaging app, or maybe imitating design elements from your own app’s notifications.

These native-inspired ads do what Vueling have done – use something recognisable to make us pay attention.

Why does this work?

My hypothesis on why these work is the familiarity heuristic. This psychological principle tells us that people prefer the familiar to the novel. Mix this with some level of pattern matching we do day-to-day, and they seem to work.

Ad blindness is a real problem. But so too is just shouting at you in ad form.

These ads jump out at you – but they don’t scream.

Just aping someone else’s design though is lazy. And you can’t just copy and paste a design element from your favourite mobile OS and hope for the best.

But, if you can land it in the same way Vueling have done, you might be on to a flyaway winner.