• by Wayne Friedman , December 1, 2010

What type of holiday TV ads work this time of year? Real-life people -- not cartoon characters -- are remembered the most.

The Nielsen Company says viewers have a 22% higher live-action TV commercial brand recall over animated commercials. The brand index measure is the percentage of TV viewers who can recall the commercial and its brand 24 hours after viewing it.

Female viewers tend to have better recall for live-action ads -- 27% higher than animation -- than male viewers, 17% higher than animation.

The best-performing ad categories for live-action ads versus animation are in the consumer product group area: the personal-care category. But animation does work fairly well in the food ingredient and seasoning category, which is a big part of holiday dinner-making. Here, brand recall was 28% higher for animation ads versus live-action.

Older viewers tend to remember live-action ads more than their younger counterparts, for whom the differences between live-action and animation recall were more equal. Adults ages 35 to 49 had a 24% increase in live-action ad brand recall over animated commercials.

But among 13- to-35-year-olds, there was only a 11% better recall among live-action versus animated commercials.