Jeffrey Loewenstein, Rajagopal Raghunathan, & Chip Heath The Repetition-Break Plot Structure Makes Effective Television Advertisements The plot structure in television advertisements can enhance consumers’ brand attitudes and foster increasing consumer and industry recognition. A corpus analysis of contemporary television advertisements shows that advertisements using the repetition-break plot structure are a small percentage of television advertisements but a large percentage of Clio and Effie award–winning advertisements. They are also likely to attain postings and views on YouTube. Three experiments using television advertisements from contemporary brands show that repetition- break advertisements are persuasive, leading to more favorable brand attitudes and greater purchase intentions than similar plot structures and that this effect is attributable in part to the advertisements being more engaging. Thus, a theoretically explainable and generic plot structure yields effective advertisements. The result is a new and flexible tool for marketing professionals to use to generate advertisements, with guidelines for when and why it should and should not be effective. Keywords: repetition-break, advertising, narratives, ad structure, surprise, engagement Jeffrey Loewenstein is Associate Professor of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (e-mail: jloew@illinois.edu). Rajagopal Raghunathan is Associate Professor of Marketing, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin (e-mail: raj.raghunathan@ mccombs.utexas.edu). Chip Heath is Thrive Foundation for Youth Profes- sor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University (e-mail: chip.heath@ stanford.edu). The authors acknowledge financial support from the McCombs School of Business, the tireless assistance of Lisa Twu and Joy Si, and extremely thoughtful feedback from Page Moreau, Sharon Shavitt, Andy Gershoff, and Jonathan Silverstein. © 2011, American Marketing Association ISSN: 0022-2429 (print), 1547-7185 (electronic) Journal of Marketing Vol. 75 (September 2011), 105–119 105 A dvertisers seek to increase consumer engagement with brands (Allen, Fournier, and Miller 2008; Poly- orat, Alden, and Kim 2009). However, consumers vary in what they find engaging and, as such, enhancing consumer engagement has been a challenge (Homberg, Steiner, and Totzek 2009; Rumbo 2002; Yankelovich and Meer 2006). One means of addressing this challenge is to tell better and more universal stories to draw consumers in—that is, to develop engaging advertising by spurring thinking and transporting consumers in narratives (Adaval and Wyer 1998; Wang and Calder 2009; Wentzel, Tomczak, and Herrmann 2010). We report novel evidence that an old narrative structure found in folktales around the world (e.g., the Three Billy Goats Gruff; Barbeau 1960; Chophel 1984; Zipes 2002), called the repetition-break plot structure (Loewenstein and Heath 2009), is surprisingly potent in modern advertisements. In doing so, we contribute to mar- keting research showing that broadly valued and exception- ally creative communications can be generated through pre- dictable underlying recipes for structuring advertising content. In support of this possibility, some existing effec- tive advertisements use the repetition-break plot structure, so called because it uses a repetitious series of similar events to establish a pattern that is then extended or broken by a final event to generate new meaning (Loewenstein and Heath 2009). The similarity of the initial events spurs people to compare them and thereby generate a novel expectation, which sets up an opportunity for the final event to deviate and generate surprise. For example, one of the most successful advertising campaigns of the past 20 years is MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign. The first advertise- ment ran during the 1997 World Series: “Two tickets: $28. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18. One auto- graphed baseball: $45. Real conversation with 11-year-old son: priceless.” It was a surprising and poignant advertise- ment, spurring MasterCard, previously a distant second in the credit card market to Visa, to parity in growth and spawning a campaign that translated easily into more than 100 countries. The 2010 Grand Clio award for the best television advertisement also used the repetition-break plot structure. In the advertisement, Tasmanian water is said to be magic. It shows a series of parallel, dramatic transformations: A bicycle enters the water and turns into a motorcycle, a hum- ble ukulele enters the water and turns into a beautiful guitar, an old kayak turns into a new speedboat, and, in the final key transformation, ordinary beer turns into Boag’s Draught, the beer that is the subject of the advertisement. The previous campaign for Boag’s Draught suggested it was a humbler product, showing construction workers lay- ing pipe to deliver freshly brewed beer. Thus, the initial repetition of transformations established a pattern that was then extended, surprisingly, to the final item: Boag’s Draught beer must be special. The new campaign spurred double-digit growth. We suggest that the repetition-break plot structure, exemplified by the MasterCard and Boag’s Draught adver-