‘Not all screens are equal’ – new research reveals how to edit ads for mobile
Neuroscience expert Richard Silberstein explains how advances in understanding long-term memory can optimise adverts displayed on smartphones
Professor Richard Silberstein is one of the world leaders in neuroscience research in advertising. He can’t, he jokes, read your mind. But if you let him hook you up to an SST (Steady State Topography) headset while watching a commercial, you’ll be shocked at quite how much he can deduce.
“We measure the speed of processing in different parts of the brain,” Silberstein explained at Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit. “What that means is that we can record a sense of engagement. How intense an experience it is. Do you like it? Are you paying attention? And we can also tell whether a piece of information will be stored in your long-term memory.”
Professor Richard Silberstein addresses Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit
This is something the professor has dedicated much of his starry career to investigating. Of course, the more engaging and memorable an advert is, the better. But it’s more than that – memory can influence future decisions. So, knowing how to optimise your adverts – and often those can be just a subtle editing tweak – can have an enormous impact on advertising effectiveness. This isn’t abstract advice or philosophy, but actionable tips.
“The left hemisphere of the brain shows a preference for more detailed information, while the right reveals a preference for global features such as scenery. It also tracks emotional dimensions,” he explained.
“We can track both of these on a second-by-second basis. Look at the graph – if the red line is above the blue line you’re paying attention to details. If the blue line is above the red, you are looking at the bigger picture.”
This slide from Neuro-Insight’s presentation shows how adverts are measured
What he finds though, increasingly, is that many people remain entranced by an advert during the narrative stage of big productions, but that this “falls off a cliff” when the brand connection is unveiled at the end. In essence, you’ve made a lovely video, but nobody can recall what the brand was you were meant to be advertising in the first place.
He used the example of Evian’s dancing babies. Some claimed it was the most successful viral ad of all time – but it coincided with a bizarre drop in sales. People loved the advert, but there was no link in people’s minds between bottled water and, well, dancing babies.
Silberstein said: “If the levels of ‘memory encoding’ are not high at the end when your brand is introduced, then it’s worse than not advertising. Essentially, those positive earlier moments go to your competitors.”
He lists a number of reasons why memory is so important. Firstly, if something is not in long-term memory then it doesn’t exist. That’s obvious. But what isn’t so obvious is how long-term memory is selected. Sometimes the brain decides that certain experience are more important than others. It may be triggered by curiosity, say, or simply seeing a friend. Silberstein compares it to pressing a “hot button”.
However, the key point is how long-term memory affects future events. Silberstein gave an example: “Neuroscience for years misunderstood long-term memory as simply a mere record of the past. In fact, if that were the case, then our memories would be much better and not so easily prone to distortions or influence.
“Recent evidence has shown that the brain regions that are involved in recollecting memories are the very same regions that are also active when you imagine what you plan on doing in the future. For example, if I was to measure your brain activity now and asked you what you were doing two birthdays ago, certain regions of the brain would light up. But if I asked you what you are going to be doing in two birthdays from now, those very same regions would light up, too.”
Long-term memory then, is the biggest factor influencing future behaviour. “This insight became a revolution in how we think of memory,” he added.
What Silberstein then did is take that and turn it into practical tips that can be used by creatives filming, and crucially editing, adverts. His team can find out exactly the points in a production where brain activity spikes – iconic triggers, he calls them – to ensure that those spikes happen at the moment of a brand reveal in a big commercial advert. Or, to make sure multiple iconic triggers aren’t edited out when TV ads become shorter mobile videos.
An ‘iconic trigger’ charted on the above Heineken TVC
“Iconic triggers are a replay button,” Silberstein explained. “It is one of the most powerful methodologies to introduce to consumer touch points. But they work well when considering context, too – that is, the program it’s in. People have multiple screens now – mobile, tablet, desktop – so we researched how the screen affects the experience. On a large TV, you focus on specific details, but mobile devices are associated with global features.”
“The way ads are edited for different screens can make a significant difference to how they are processed.”
Mobile screens tend to make the right hemisphere light up, so identifying what elements in the creative speak do this will help maximise the effectiveness of the screen. Using his technology, longer adverts can be edited down to retain more of the moments that engage audiences most.
For a laptop or phone, scenes need to be globally biased
But for a TV or tablet, they need to be detailed-based
“Iconic triggers are a powerful tool to integrate into all forms of advertising,” concluded Silberstein. “And it’s just one way of linking creativity to programmatic advertising.”
topics
Dr Richard Silberstein
Finance Marketing Summot
Marketing
mobile video
Neuroinsight
neuroscience
optimisation
CONTENT SPONSORED BY Neuro-Insight
Absolutely fascinating. Given the right hemisphere’s association with the emotional components of our brain, might there also be a link between the mobile phone and the interpretation that it serves as some sort of ‘security blanket’?
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Sorry, the plumber just arrived. To finish my question, is it possible that the nature of the relationship between user and mobile phone is sufficiently different from the relationship between user and other screens so as to affect the absorption of the screened communication?
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Thanks for your question Antony – this is certainly a possibility, although from the current data we have collected it wouldn’t be possible to say so. A separate study would be required to answer this hypothesis. More broadly our interpretation for the differences in processing seen across different screens are derived from perceptual neuroscience. Consuming media on a smaller screen forces you to take in more of the overall ‘picture’ simply as a function of the screen size – it would require more effort to constantly focus on the individual onscreen elements which are considerably smaller than what is found on larger TV screens.
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Thanks for responding Shaun.
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