A Comprehensive Theory of Advertising
by Bill Harvey

Editoramp8217s note We resume In Terms of ROI with a condensed adaptation of Bill Harveyamp8217s A Comprehensive Theory of Advertising written before his passing and edited for length by the RMTLabs team It brings together questions that animated his work for decades why people choose how advertising influences those choices and why understanding human motivation mattersWe can know that something works without understanding why it works But without knowing why every use of it is a shot in the dark guided by the latest persuasive result or by intuitionBefore we had todayamp8217s understanding of electromagnetism and the atom we could already light up cities Understanding why they behave as they do brought us MRI scans television computers the internet and AIAdvertising needs that kind of understandingWe have accumulated knowledge about reach frequency memory emotion persuasion and context We have models describing the stages between an opportunity to encounter an advertisement and a purchase We have increasingly sophisticated ways to observe what people doBut what connects these observations Why does a particular message change one personamp8217s predisposition toward a brand while leaving another person unmovedThe theory presented here begins with motivation and it stands or falls on one test whether motivation predicts advertising outcomes beyond what relevance congruence attention emotion and persuasion already explainThe theory in briefMotivation is the missing link Industry models like the ARFamp8217s map every step from exposure to sales Attention emotion and context each explain a piece whether an ad was noticed how it felt where it ran None of them explains why someone buys Motivation doesPeople buy what serves their motivations mostly below conscious awarenessResonance is the match between creative and audience the ad delivered to the people it motivates Placing it in content that carries the same motivations boosts it furtherWhen motivations align the message resonates It gets past the brainamp8217s filter the brand gains meaning and the odds of purchase go up with less frequency and less wasteamp160What makes a brand matterPeople do not come to advertising as empty vessels waiting to receive a message They arrive with their own deepseated motivations most of which operate below conscious awareness These motivations help determine what seems relevant what feels rewarding and what is worth choosingamp8220Motivationamp8221 is used loosely in our field to cover needs goals desires values and emotional states This theory uses it in one precise sense described below a set of psychological dimensions derived from real choices and measured independently of any advertising outcomeThe question is not simply whether someone understands what a product does It is whether the person perceives that the brand could help satisfy something that matters to themWhen an advertisement conveys that possibility the brand acquires additional meaning Its perceived value changes A predisposition to try it can increase possibly from zeroThis is the essential idea of motivational resonance a connection between the motivations carried by a message and those already present in the person receiving itamp8220Comprehensiveamp8221 does not mean that motivation is the only thing that matters It means looking for a mechanism that connects the parts of advertising we have often studied separatelyExposure emotion memory persuasion context and frequency all have roles Motivational resonance helps explain why those elements produce different effects for different peopleA common human languageHuman beings share a pool of motivations but their priorities and combinations make each of us distinctive The same message can therefore resonate with many people without having the same significance for everyoneThis is one reason reach works A motivationally resonant advertisement can travel well across a broad audience Understanding motivation need not mean abandoning scale It can mean understanding what gives a message its power at scaleIn the work that became RMTLabs we approached these questions through observed choices We began with more than 13000 psychological dimensions drawn from the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary then used machine learning against settop box viewing data and a program recommender to identify which dimensions were implicated in what people actually choseThat process distilled 265 psychological descriptors now called Value Signals The important point is that they were derived from choices not from asking people to explain themselves They were also measured independently of any advertising outcome which is what allows motivational resonance to be tested against outcomes rather than defined by themNeuroeconomics approaches the same territory from another direction It studies how the brain computes value when making choices As Michael Platt of Wharton Neuroscience has observed the underlying computation applies across very different decisions cookies spouses and stocksThat is the basis for expecting a taxonomy derived from program choice to generalize to brandsWhat persuasion meansIn this theory persuasion occurs when someone consciously or subconsciously perceives that a brand might increase the satisfaction of a motivation Positive feeling and memory can become part of that process The brand is no longer represented in quite the same way in the personamp8217s mindThat does not make purchase inevitable Category need price availability existing preferences competition and product experience still matter Advertising changes a probability within that larger worldThis theory also suggests an extension to the Advertising Research Foundationamp8217s model of how advertising works a model I helped author It walks from vehicle exposure and ad exposure through attention communication persuasion and ad interaction to sales What it does not explain is why one ad gets through and another does not Between advertising exposure and attention this theory adds a stage called Subconscious Resonance the process through which a message connects with motivations already present in the individual helping determine whether it enters conscious awareness That is the missing linkWhy context belongs in the theoryAn advertisement is not experienced in isolation The surrounding content has already helped establish a mood a set of associations and a psychological orientationWhen an ad and its context resonate the context can amplify the advertising experience rather than interrupt itThere are many kinds of similarity settings characters language colors tempo or emotion These can make a transition feel easier and less dissonant Motivational alignment goes further because it connects to what makes something worth choosingSimilarity of the nonmotivational kind still helps ad recall and brand awareness Byron Sharp has been interpreted probably unfairly as saying that the job of advertising is merely to get the brand onto the mental map It is more efficient for advertising to achieve much more than a foot in the doorThis suggests three connected considerations what motivations the creative expresses how those motivations relate to the audience and how the surrounding content supports themCreative audience and context are not separate experiences for the person receiving the advertising They become one experienceFrequency belongs in this picture too Repeated messages carrying a consistent motivational meaning can reinforce a changing perception of the brand When the creative the audience and the context all carry the same motivations less frequency should be needed to achieve trial or repeat purchase of the brandProven in marketThis is not just a theory It has been tested against the measures the industry already trusts and against salesIn 2017 MRI Simmons found that adding the motivational taxonomy improved its ability to explain brand adoption by 83 across 3830 brands in hundreds of product categories An ARF Cognition Council analysis using an earlier 15cluster version of the taxonomy found that motivation clusters explained 59 of the variance in six years of IRI sales dataIn a FOXsponsored Wharton Neuroscience study contextad motivational resonance was the only statistically significant predictor of EEG synchrony the brain response associated with effective advertising It outperformed the other EEG measures of attention memory and approachavoidance eyetracking and conventional pretest measures of ad recall and persuasion Separately RMTLabs inmarket tests found that campaigns using motivational methods performed better at every stage of the funnel and especially in salesThe sales results have been stronger than moveablemiddle targeting or any other advanced audience I have tested in the past halfcenturyPractitioners who have run it see the same thing As Scott Sutton Director of Media CKE Restaurants put it after testing amp8220Weamp8217ve tested it and it worksamp8221Three different measuresamp8212brand adoption brain response and salesamp8212all point the same way when motivations align advertising works harder The invitation to every advertiser is simple test motivational resonance against your bestperforming audienceThe larger opportunity is not simply to improve a targeting technique It is to understand advertising as a relationship between what a brand communicates and what a person valuesApplied ethically and wisely that understanding can reduce waste build trust where it is deserved help neutralize manipulative uses of mass media make advertising more enjoyable and help businesses growWe can also ask a better question Not merely amp8220How do we get our message in front of peopleamp8221 but amp8220How do we make sure our message resonates with the people it reaches in the moment it reaches themamp8221 That is the difference between knowing that advertising works and knowing whyPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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A Comprehensive Theory of Advertising
by Bill Harvey