Professor Richard Silberstein is the world’s foremost authority on using neuroscience to optimise advertising. It’s a sector of market research he practically invented after pioneering a form of measuring brain reaction called Steady State Topography (SST) in the mid-1980s. Yet, a few years ago, a business approached him with a discovery he’d never encountered.
The client, a financial services provider, found that its sales bizarrely increased when its competitor, ING, ran big-budget promotional campaigns. Was this just a coincidence, they asked, or was this something they could capitalise on?
Silberstein and his team set to work.
The crux of neuroscience research in marketing is the belief that the decisions we make as consumers are not rational but emotional. They can often be subconscious and delivered at lightning speed. Not only that, but customers’ behaviour often contradicts what they claim in focus groups or questionnaires. Just because your research participant promises he’s going to buy the latest Nintendo console, doesn’t mean he won’t instead rush out of the lab to purchase the new Sony PlayStation.
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“Creatives are profoundly sceptical about this type of research,” explains the softly spoken Silberstein. “And they’ve every right to be. Questionnaires and focus groups are a very poor indicator of what’s going on and offer very little explanatory variance.”
Silberstein’s company, Neuro-Insight, begins its analysis by using SST to record brain activity as participants watch ads on either TVs, computers or mobile devices. Essentially, they measure the speed of neural processing – and therefore activity – in different parts of the brain. As different areas specialise in different functions, they can measure processes including what thoughts become long-term memories, how engaging an advert is and the level of visual attention.
Long-term memory is the most significant cognitive ability. Not just for obvious reasons – clearly, if you don’t remember the advert, it’s pointless – but because memories influence future decisions, too. Canny marketers need to make sure the right scenes, such as branding or a key message, are strongly encoded into long-term memory. And they need to identify what those scenes are in order to use them in other forms of marketing – say, what moment to reproduce on a poster, or which clips to retain on a shorter 15-second edit. Neuro-Insight term those remembered moments “Iconic Triggers”.
Furthermore, long-term memory is a much more complex process than scientists first thought. “People used to think of long-term memory like a Victorian library where you can go and pull a book out,” he says. “But we now think that’s only partially correct. If memory was intended to be a precise record of what’s happened, you would expect it to be as good as the eyes or ears, but it’s very sloppy. It’s easy to manipulate and plant false memories. What current research has shown is that memory is linked to future actions. For instance, if you ask someone what they will be doing for their next birthday, their brain will instantly recall what happened on birthdays in the past. The brain regions involved in the recall of previous experiences are the very same regions that imagine the future.”
Silberstein used this knowledge to test the relationship between rival products and their campaigns. They conducted an experiment where subjects were shown adverts for Apple and Samsung phones, and then asked to make instantaneous, snap judgements on how that changed their perception of the rival using a form of implicit association testing that evaluated unconscious brand associations. When people were shown footage of the Samsung Galaxy, the association between ‘innovation’ and the Samsung brand grew, as you might expect. But, more interestingly, viewing the ad also grew the association between ‘stale’ and the Apple brand. “In terms of relationships between brands, we have found there is frequently a zero-sum game, especially in highly competitive categories,” he says.
Or in other words, if one company gets a boost, their rivals will likely take a hit.
So, while they may have proved a link between competitor firms and perception, it doesn’t explain how an advert can backfire.
The answer, they found, was in where the iconic triggers – the most memorable moments – landed in an advert. If they happened to be in the narrative, but not the brand reveal at the end, association between the narrative and the company paying for the ad was lost. What the brain then does was associate all that positive feelings and messaging to the more memorable brand leader. “Nothing in the brain is stored in isolation,” explains Silberstein. “All memories are linked by associations.”
Perversely, creative agencies who were working hard to incorporate a brilliant story into their TVCs were giving all the goodwill away. ING’s advert may have been clever and entertaining, but it handed its core message of fairness to its rival.
“It’s much worse than not advertising,” emphasises Silberstein. “And it’s much more common when you have a highly entertaining piece of narrative because there is a temptation to end the story and then introduce the brand’s logo.” The brain switches off at this point to process the preceding narrative and fails to encode the crucial branding information.
The solution?
“The best solution is to integrate the brand message into the narrative,” he argues. That way, you don’t have a separation between the story and the plug. Alternatively, all it may take is a slight re-edit where the branding is brought forward or delayed by one or two seconds.
It didn’t take long before Silberstein was able to use the findings to help other clients. An MLC advert, for example, showing a conversation between a grandad and grandchild discussing retirement was re-edited to introduce the brand logo slightly into the earlier story and also remove the scene of them walking off screen. You can see the change in the above before-and-after video. “Often, you don’t have to reshoot, just tweak or tinker,” he clarifies. “That MLC advert had been on air for three months but after they made the change, they saw a 40% increase in leads.”
What’s interesting is that narrative-based adverts are becoming ever more popular among creative agencies, especially since YouTube allowed campaigns to run to any length. The lines between a traditional brand ad and sponsored content are blurring – with consumers seemingly preferring adverts that are credible pieces of entertainment in their own right. You only have to look at the global success of the John Lewis Christmas adverts to see its effectiveness.
How often, you wonder, might these type of campaigns be getting it wrong, then?
“I’ve seen it in about half of examples we’ve been presented with,” says Silberstein. “And we’ve identified it much more regularly than we thought.”
All of which should make marketers think twice before they rush to send off the final cut of their creative to broadcasters.
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