Touching All Bases to Make Advertising Work Harder

You know the old expression amp8220too much of a good thingamp8221 It might have meant many other things in other contexts but I bring it up here only because amp8211 in a lot of the work Iamp8217m now doing in the attention arena amp8211 I can see that many of us are losing sight of the other levels of the ARF Model and acting as if attention is the central pivot point in advertisingIt isnamp8217t Itamp8217s actually first base The home run requires two more bases that must be touched to get to sales and brand equity effectivenessYour ad could get a ton of attention but if it does not touch the other two bases you will not see increased sales or brand loveDavid Ogilvy in Ogilvy on Advertising said this in his own inimitable way when he said amp8220If I want a high recall score all I have to do is show a gorilla in a jock strapamp8221When I first joined the business amp8220dayafter recallamp8221 scores were all the rage Today itamp8217s attention They are highly related to one another in the Meta study in which I participated last year the outcome metric most highly correlated with attention was ad recallEye tracking is very useful but not quite as definitive in measuring attention as reduction in alpha waves in the brain as measured by EEG The alpha state is more of a mindful relaxed state taking in everything at once and when we narrow our focus to select one stimulus on which to focus that is attention and that represents a reduction in alpha waves and an increase in beta waves which are faster vibrations than alpha wavesIn my prior article Wharton Neuroscientist Elizabeth Johnson everyone knows her as Zab commented on the subconscious type of attention where the individual doesnamp8217t even know it happened but a part of the mindbrain complex noted the ad or something in it and this too has advertising effectiveness This can happen without being detected by eye tracking or surveys for example only the audio track of the ad might have made an impression on the subconscious Decades ago Gallup ampamp Robinson reported that people who said they were not watching the TV show playing on a TV set in their home had 25 of the ad recall level of other people who said they were watching the showSo attention is more than the conscious attention that the industry has been focused upon Thank you ZabWhat is second base In the ARF Model the level just above Attention is called Communication Looking at it through the lens of neuroscience however a more precise measure of second base is positive emotion Another leading neuroscientist at Wharton Michael Platt calls it Joy He points out exactly where it occurs in the brain He reports that amp8220Joy while viewing ads predicts 80 variance in salesamp8221 It might be noted that attention has never been shown to be that highly predictive of advertising sales effect amp8211 the stats I have seen are all below 30In the image above I call second base amp8220Caringamp8221 amp8211 meaning they may have paid conscious or subconscious attention but did they care about it And was it a positive caring or a negative caringIt is worth pointing out that Michaelamp8217s stats are based on brain measurements not on asking people questions or reading their facial expressions which are blunter instruments for detecting second base has been touchedMichaelamp8217s data shows that it takes about 5 seconds for the Joy to set in and it takes 15 seconds to peak Since attention research always shows that 12 seconds is the average attention given to digital advertising there are exceptions we can understand why this form of advertising has a reminder effect fine for stimulating ongoing purchase of a brand but not so good at growing the brand user baseRichy Davidson another top neuroscientist it was my honor to work with years ago invented todayamp8217s standard method of reading emotional valence based on frontal asymmetry in brain activityThird base is called Persuasion in the ARF Model which is very closely aligned with neuroscience which measures attraction to the brand Wharton measures this with EEG based on the neural similarity across audience members in a probably novel application of Synchrony to forecasting which predicts more than 90 of the variance in sales fMRI is also used to measure Value Signals and both measures track well with each other EEG is better at measuring things second by second and fMRI is better at measuring specific spots in the brainNothing else I have ever seen predicts 90 of sales This is a major achievementIf you miss a base as you run around the baseball diamond you are not going to get a home run Letamp8217s avoid the temptation of reductionism oversimplification overreliance on one dimension of what is needed for success in advertising To not prioritize all three dimensions one is underthinking itPosted 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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Touching All Bases to Make Advertising Work Harder

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Bill Harvey

The Ad Council, Huntsman Mental Health Foundation and Amazon Announce “The Mind Set” to Support Mental Health - Ad Council InSites

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