Keep in mind how a human brain works

It used to be so easy. Marketers who wanted to make some noise about their brand simply created a great big television ad. But these days it’s much more complicated. The growth of online channels has left marketers wondering which direction is most effective for their brand.

A neuroscience study commissioned by television marketing body Thinkbox reveals TV advertising generates greater levels of engagement andemotion, but online generates higher levels of attention.

The qualitative study, which combined two neuroscience techniques, suggests that TV advertising generates a 30% higher level of engagement than other marketing methods because people are better able to immerse themselves in the campaigns. The study, which monitors brain waves, shows that people feel much more involved in an advert screened on television and are more able to identify with the scenario played out on their television screens, compared with online.

But people pay much more attention when they are online because of how they use the internet, explains David Brennan, research and strategy director at Thinkbox. “Online generates higher levels of attention because it’s a lean forward [or active] medium. It’s very task-oriented. Whereas TV is very entertainment-orientated and creates emotion.”

The study, which examines how different parts of the human brain react to advertising, also finds that if a brand has exposure on television first, people will engage much more with the ad when they see it online. However, people concentrate much less on the visuals online when they have seen the TV campaign first, compared with how they absorb the same advert on television.

Engagement with that online advert is more than 20% higher if it is screened on television first, according to the study. This is because detailed memory processing, which means that the advert is more likely to be remembered by the viewer, increases by more than a quarter.

Contextual memory processing – which is responsible for viewers remembering the actual brand that is being advertised – doubles when the ad is shown first on television and then online. There is no equivalent effect if you show the ad online first and then screen it on television.

People can be stimulated through most of the senses, not just visual, notes Brennan. Exposing your brand through television and online makes it more likely that one of those senses, or a combination of visual, aural and language, will be stimulated, making the most of a creative campaign, he argues. “TV primes all online, particularly pre-roll. It creates that emotion and engagement.”

Different formats of online advertising generate different brain activity, the study has found. Pre-roll ads produce brain activity most like TV, whereas search and website browsing demand more visual attention from users.

The ability to remember an advert is triggered by a number of factors, such as how engaged people feel during an advert, the emotional intensity that is evoked, the general reaction – either positive or negative – to that advert, and the attention that can be commanded during the advert, according to the study.

“Most people only remember key scenes from the last movie they saw,” explains Brennan. These scenes are important because the brain fills in the story in between. The study calls this “information chunking” and shows that brainwaves peak at certain moments, taking snapshots of the movie being watched, and troughs where the detail is lost.

“It’s where it peaks that we commit the information to memory,” says Brennan. “You’ve got to ask yourself: ’Do these peaks happen when the brand is an intrinsic part of the ad?’

“If they do, you’ll automatically remember what the ad was for and what brand you associate with it. If they don’t, you might think about it as a beautiful piece of content, but you won’t remember what it’s for.”

Small changes to TV creative can therefore make a huge difference to how the ad performs. “From a creative point of view, it’s usually just a slight edit here and there to make the key brand moments match the point where long-term memory encoding peaks,” says Brennan. The study sees consistent brain movements across the sample of people who took part in the research, he adds.

While the brain is processing an “information chunk”, the ability to take in information reduces, so these moments are bad places to put branding, suggests the research.

“Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of things, to work out the story, narrative or joke,” says Brennan. The brain tries to work out what is happening in an ad and when it answers the question, the ability to commit information to memory drops significantly. Advertisers make the mistake of putting the brand name in just as people are digesting the punchline.

Brennan suggests that advertisers do not have to make drastic creative changes to make the brand more memorable. “Moving the pack shot 15 frames further forward, for instance, means that advertisers would be able to exploit that peak in memory encoding,” he says.

Another aspect of ad creativity that is shown to influence the way the brain processes advertising is facial expression. Both the FMRI and SST approaches reveal that facial expression drives empathy and people reflect back the emotion depicted in the advert.

This is described in the research as “mirror neurones”.

The “wrong” face in an ad can act as an “off switch” to our memory processing, says Brennan. “Not surprisingly, when we see someone smile, we smile and feel happy inside. That is an association that will work for most advertisers. Where we had smiling faces in this study, there seems a real uplift in engagement and emotion.”

Brennan adds that this doesn’t mean you can’t use scowling faces to provoke a negative reaction, but you need to do that early on in the narrative, such as setting up a conflict and then resolving it at the end of the advert.

“We found examples of negative processing towards the end of the ad. For example, there was a woman shot in one [unnamed] ad who looked quite haughty and disdainful and the drop in emotional approach and intensity and engagement, especially among young women, was quite stunning.”

If that’s the point where the branding comes in, it is less likely that the advert will be remembered. And if it is remembered, it will be with a negative association.

Emotional salience
Music is also found to increase emotion and engagement. Ads with music significantly increase emotional salience and engagement, according to the research, which also reports that an advert is more likely to be enjoyed if it is accompanied by music.

“It’s something that advertisers can add to the toolkit to say we know how to use this to really drive the emotion and engagement, which in turn increases your chances of getting bigger peaks for long-term memory encoding,” says Brennan. If viewers commit information to memory when music is playing, it’s more likely to be a positive memory, he adds.

The effect of the programme next to which the advert is being screened is also significant, he says. “If people are engaged with the programme, they’re likely to be more engaged with the advertising within it. This is particularly true of the ads that are first, second and third in the break because you’ve got a kind of halo effect from the programme itself.” The programme can have an even greater effect on the memory of an advert if it is in tune with the style of the programme, he explains.

The way people process television and online advertising may be different, according to this research, but if an advertiser combines the power of television advertising and online, then it is more likely to stay on a consumer’s wavelength.