Ryan Reynolds ran an experiment to find out why ads with his face work and he is ‘shattered’ by the results, here’s why

• We will be lying if we say that we haven’t wondered why all Ryan Reynolds advertisements work so well.
• After spending a lot of time observing the patterns in his successful ads, we came to the conclusion that the secret success mantra is Ryan Reynolds himself. We assumed that it is easy for any brand’s advertisement to perform well if they onboard Ryan.
• Turns out, we were wrong. Ryan Reynolds’ latest post-campaign survey shows why ads without his face can work better.

Ryan Reynolds is often called a ‘marketing genius’ and the ‘best pitchman’ for his special skill. He can make his audience watch an advertisement without making them realise that he is actually selling a product. Over the years, we have wondered what his secret is. Now, we have an answer.

Ryan Reynolds’ venture MNTN with Maximum Effort, conducted a consumer survey together to find out if they can make any advertisement successful by onboarding Ryan as its protagonist. They ran two different advertisements: one with Ryan and another one that is just narrated by him with more focus on campaign’s messaging.

Find out the results below in Ryan’s video captioned, “My face is trying not to take these MNTN results personally.”

MNTN spent $25,000 on its B2B campaign promoting its platform in premium TV environments, with a target audience selected of people who worked in marketing with site visits set as the key success metric. It measured the level of reach and impressions both of these ads garnered and came to the conclusion that the advertisement without Ryan worked better.

In this video, Ryan Reynolds and Imani Clark, Customer Success Specialist, MNTN, walk us through the campaign results. The video without Ryan drove 117% more site visits than the video he starred in, the visit rate was 1.61% and the best performing networks were CNN, USA Network, NSC Sports. Hearing these results, Ryan said, “That is crushing for an actor to hear…You literally just broke my soul into a thousand tiny pieces. Brands who have paid me so much money for my face over the years have totally wasted their cash.”

However, it was Ryan who made both these ads, and turns out, it is not just his face, but his brilliant brain behind his creative ads that makes people stop, take notice and engage.