THE PERFECT AD. Is Neuro Science the Key to Success?

Original article published in UniSA Business School’s unisabusiness magazine.

When Old Spice launched their ‘Smell Like a Man, Man’ campaign in 2010, no one could have predicted its success. Overnight, the 70-year-old brand became a cultural phenomenon, earning nearly 1.2 billion media impressions, a 2700% increase in Twitter followers, and a 300% increase in traffic to oldspice.com. It was later awarded advertising’s highest industry honour at the Cannes Lion Film Grand Prix, and an Emmy nomination for the year’s most Outstanding Commercial.

Such success is, however, rare. Creating an ad that captures and holds our attention, tugs at our emotions, and stays in our mind, is an advertiser’s dream. But despite best efforts, few ads achieve such perfection—and predicting which ads are actually going to sell, has remained elusive.

Until now.

The latest research in advertising is testing if biometrics and neuroscience can improve advertising effectiveness. The research will allow advertisers to more consistently produce great ads, as well as cull those that are destined to fail.

It’s an exciting time in the world of advertising. Much has been discovered about how our brains work—how we build, maintain and retrieve memories, what we pay attention to, and the role of emotions in decision-making.

There are important lessons for creating great ads, including a number of good reasons why emotional content can enhance advertising effectiveness:

  1. Emotional content can grab and hold attention. 
  1. People seem to be willing to watch enjoyable emotional content over and over. 
  1. Emotional content is generally processed more quickly than factual information, and emotions can sometimes help us remember information. 
  1. Emotions are thought to influence our decisions.

A new suite of tools developed by brain and cognitive psychology scientists are enabling advertising researchers to measure our arousal, attention, memories and emotional responses to advertising. And this all without asking questions, but by measuring bodily responses like muscle movements or the level of sweat.

But while there is a plethora of different tools and analysis approaches, there is little robust knowledge of how valid they are in the marketing domain. The ability to measure how human bodies respond to an ad is not enough if we can’t use that knowledge to separate good and bad ads, in terms of how they sell.

There is already a lot known about what advertising needs to do in order to drive sales.

Advertising should:

  1. Be clear (use distinctive assets, as well as visual and verbal brand mentions).
  2. Refresh and build relevant memories to help the brand come to mind for more people across the range of relevant situations where they might buy.
  3. Cut through the clutter and grab attention.
  4. Get an emotional response like a laugh or gasp.
  5. Be worth watching… over time.
  6. Have broad appeal among category users.

To improve advertising success, the Mars Marketing Lab at UniSA’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, has conducted what is likely the largest ever investigation into the potential of biometrics and other psychophysiological measures in advertising effectiveness, measured by in-market sales.

To read more visit:  unisabusinessschool.edu.au/the-perfect-adunisabusiness provides an analysis of topics of interest to managers and leaders, providing you with access to expert advice from UniSA Business School’s world-class research scholars. It features thought-provoking articles, quick guides and top tips, and interviews with industry leaders.

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Working with global partners—Mars Inc., US-based MediaScience Labs, and UniSA’s own Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory—the research involved a series of studies to assess multiple measures that have been developed in medicine and neuroscience to quantify emotion and attention responses in the body and the brain.

The ads supplied by Mars Inc. have gold-standard measures of their in-market success. These have undergone further testing through the MediaScience Labs to measure biometrics, such as heart rate (an indicator of attention), facial expression (a good indicator of emotions such as joy), and skin conductance (a measure of arousal).

Read the results published in Journal of Advertising Research: www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/content/early/2016/12/19/JAR-2016-051

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For more information, visit the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science or email magda@marketingscience.info.

Authors:

Associate Professor Magda Nenycz-Thiel and Associate Professor Rachel Kennedy are researchers with the internationally renowned Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science with the University of South Australia.

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