Chapter 11
Advertising Effectiveness
In This Chapter
Distinguishing between two views of how advertising works
Understanding challenges to the traditional model of advertising effectiveness
Seeing how ads can be effective even when we aren’t paying much attention to them
Learning how ads can impact brand attitudes and sales without containing a persuasive message
People have a love-hate relationship with advertising. On the one hand, they record their favorite TV programs with digital video recorders (DVRs), largely so they can fast-forward through the commercials. On the other hand, they tune in to the Super Bowl every year almost as much to watch the new commercials as to watch the game.
Advertising is also the subject of a huge volume of research, both academic and commercial. It’s a complex and multifaceted topic. So, in this chapter we focus only on TV advertising, which is still where most advertising dollars are spent. In later chapters, we look into in-store advertising (Chapter 12), online advertising (Chapter 13), and product placement advertising in movies and TV programs (Chapter 14).
Our overview of advertising considers three big questions that neuromarketers and traditional market researchers tend to answer differently:
What is the purpose of advertising?
How does advertising achieve its purpose?
How can we best measure advertising effectiveness?
Two Views of How Advertising Works
If you ask an experienced traditional market researcher what advertising is for, you’ll probably get a long and nuanced answer, but the gist of the response will be that the purpose of advertising is to increase sales. How this is done is a function of persuasion, and persuasion is a function of attention, logical argument, and learning. He may mention emotional appeal, but he mostly views it as something that helps information transfer. Advertising works at the point of sale through recall — the consumer recalls the logical argument communicated in the advertising and buys the product.
If you ask a neuromarketer with a grounding in brain science the same question, you may get a very different answer. She would assert that the purpose of advertising is also to increase sales, but indirectly, by first creating positive associations with a brand or product in memory. How this happens is through conditioning, not overt persuasion. Conditioning is a function of emotional connection, repetition, and implicit learning. She may mention attention, but she may see it as an obstacle to ad effectiveness. Advertising works at the point of sale indirectly, through priming — seeing the brand in the store primes the emotional associations created by the advertising, increasing attention and likelihood to buy the product. And priming works best if advertising has succeeded in increasing familiarity, processing fluency, and liking for the brand on the shelf.
These are very simplified descriptions, but they highlight the key differences between the two views of advertising we identify in this chapter:
The direct route to advertising effectiveness: Emphasizing attention, conscious processing, logical argument, explicit recall, and sales
The indirect route to advertising effectiveness: Emphasizing emotional connections, nonconscious processing, priming, implicit memory, brand attitudes, and sales
These views are sometimes presented as mutually exclusive, but we believe they’re complementary. Each may be the more realistic model in different circumstances, for different types of products, or for different consumers.
When considering an advertising research project using either traditional or neuromarketing methods, make sure you and your research partner share a common definition of advertising effectiveness. Similarly, when working with a neuromarketing vendor or consultant, make sure you’re aligned on whether the direct or indirect route best captures your objectives for the advertising you’re testing. This will make designing studies much easier and will prevent disappointments and confusion down the line when results are presented.
The direct route: Impacting the sale directly
The historical roots of the direct route to advertising effectiveness are found in the classic persuasion models discussed in Chapter 2, including the AIDA model that defines persuasion as a four-step process of grabbing attention, generating interest, instilling desire, and enabling action (the purchase).
According to this view, the purpose of advertising is to communicate a simple and logical argument that persuades consumers to buy a product, either by reinforcing their current preferences for that product or by changing their preferences from a competing product. The role of creativity in advertising is to get consumers to pay attention to these arguments, because high attention drives later recall, which is required at the point of sale to complete the connection between the ad and the sale.
The direct route describes a process of persuasion and choice that is very much in the tradition of Kahneman’s System 2 thinking: It’s conscious, deliberate, effortful, and logical. As we explain in Chapter 2, this view is based on several assumptions (called the rational consumer model) that have been challenged by recent work in neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics.
To be clear, concerns about this approach are not derived from any doubts about whether the persuasion path it describes is psychologically possible. Numerous studies have shown that this path can work, and does work, in a wide variety of circumstances. The issue is that consumers, in their normal and everyday shopping and decision-making mode, generally do not engage in the kind of conscious thinking and logical decision making the model ascribes to them. So, the problem is not that they can’t be influenced by advertising in the manner described, but that they usually aren’t.
Here are some issues that have been identified in the direct-route model:
People normally pay little attention to most TV advertising.
People are usually unable to recall specific aspects of an ad. When they do recall successfully, they’re more likely to recall storylines and characters than product claims and verbal arguments.
People have built-in resistance to advertising claims. If they do pay attention to claims, they tend to evaluate them in terms of counterarguments.
In real-world shopping contexts, people generally don’t incorporate ad claims into their decision making. Instead, they rely on heuristics (judgment and decision-making shortcuts) and habit to make most purchase decisions.
Attributing sales to advertising is a tough case to make. With the exception of a small minority of cases, advertising does not have a large impact on sales (see the nearby sidebar, “Impacting sales with advertising isn’t easy”).
These challenges to the direct-route model do not invalidate it. However, we believe they do indicate that it has more limited applicability than might originally have been assumed. Within its realm of applicability, the model provides good explanations and predictions. Extensive ad research shows that consumers are more likely to process ads with attention and conscious evaluation, and make purchase decisions based on arguments and claims, when
The product being advertised is new or contains novel features (for example, Dyson vacuum cleaners compared to traditional vacuum cleaners).
The product’s category is new (for example, any new technology such as smartphones, tablet computers, or 3-D TVs).
The product is expensive and purchased infrequently (for example, cars, home mortgages, or appliances).
The purpose of the ad is to generate a direct response rather than a delayed sale (for example, ads soliciting charitable donations or infomercials designed to persuade viewers to “call right now”).
The indirect route: Changing and reinforcing attitudes toward the brand
In contrast to the direct route, the indirect route to advertising effectiveness is a two-step model:
1. Advertising affects brand equity in the form of changing attitudes, memory, and intentions toward the brand.
2. Brand attitudes and associations impact sales at the point of purchase.
Ads build brand equity (see Chapter 9), and brand equity drives purchase behavior.
From a marketer’s perspective, one important benefit of the indirect route as a way to look at advertising effectiveness is that it identifies more marketing checkpoints between an ad exposure and a product purchase. These are points where marketing can be measured and, if required, adjusted. Rather than trying to connect ads directly to sales, putting brand equity in the middle makes it easier to connect the pieces. First, changes in brand equity can be more directly linked to ads, because they occur in the mind of the viewer as a result of watching the ad. Second, the connection between brand equity and various aspects of market performance (including, but not limited to sales) is more direct as well. As we illustrate in Chapter 9, brand equity can affect brand performance in a number of measurable ways, including having a powerful impact on expectations, goals, fluency, and values, which in turn have been shown to impact decision making and buying behavior directly.
According to this view, the purpose of advertising is to improve brand equity. This impact is achieved through conditioning, an implicit learning process in which a positive emotional connection with the brand is created and reinforced by advertising. Conditioning operates through repetition, so ads must be seen several times for conditioning to occur. Later, at the point of sale, the positive emotional connection is activated when the brand is encountered, and from there it can influence choice and purchasing behavior.
The indirect route describes a process of priming and choice that is very much in the tradition of Kahneman’s System 1 thinking: It’s largely nonconscious, automatic, effortless, and driven more by emotion than logic. Research has shown that the indirect route tends to work best when
The product being advertised and its category are well established and familiar (leveraging existing emotional connections, familiarity, and processing fluency).
The ad minimizes information and message content and focuses on an engaging narrative in which the brand plays a central role (reinforcing the emotional connection while minimizing counter-arguing).
The product is inexpensive and purchased frequently (and less likely to trigger deliberation and explicit decision making).
The ad isn’t meant to produce a direct response in the viewer, but is aimed at building or reinforcing longer-term associations with a brand.
Driving the Direct Route to Advertising Effectiveness
In this section, we look more closely at how the direct route is believed to lead to advertising effectiveness, and summarize what recent brain science research has to say about how and when the model should work well, or not so well.
The direct route is basically the model of advertising effectiveness that smart people would’ve come up with if they hadn’t known the nonconscious mind existed. And that’s pretty much what happened. Imagine your conscious mind looking at itself and asking, “How could advertising influence me?” The direct route would be a very good answer.
If you believe the human mind is rational and logical, it follows that you would expect it to be most persuaded by logical arguments. Because arguments can be expressed either in words or in images (product demos in ads are a form of persuasive argument), you would look for just the right words or illustration to express your argument, something along the lines of saying or graphically implying, “If you want A, then you really must buy my product, B.” So you would focus on communicating that argument as your first task in creating an effective ad.
You would quickly realize that you could create the most persuasive argument imaginable, but it would be useless if nobody heard it. Your message would need to be noticed, which is to say, people would need to pay attention to it. And even then it would still be useless if they didn’t remember it when they went shopping. So, three main questions naturally arise if you want to make sure your ad is successfully driving along the direct route to advertising effectiveness:
Does it draw people’s attention?
Are they persuaded by its argument?
Will they remember it?
Today, we know a lot more about how the brain operates, including how it relies on nonconscious as well as conscious processes. We’re a lot less confident about asking our conscious minds to explain how our brains work. So, let’s take a closer look at each of these questions in light of recent brain science findings.
Pay attention, I’m talking to you
Attention is one of those psychological concepts that appears at first to be simple but then quickly becomes quite complicated. We believe we know when we’re paying attention and when we aren’t, but researchers have found that attention comes in different flavors. Two very different kinds of attention have been identified:
High attention: A state of alertness in which you’re actively and voluntarily focusing and maintaining your attention on a particular object. This is what people usually think of when they think of attention.
Low attention: Involves much less active mental control. It consists of passively monitoring objects and events in your environment, often without much awareness of doing so. You only become aware of low-attention processing when something happens that escalates it up to high attention, such as when you hear your name spoken in a crowded room.
High attention and low attention are related to, but different from, the concepts of top-down attention and bottom-up attention introduced in Chapter 5. Both top-down and bottom-up attention are mechanisms by which we can be brought to a state of high attention. Low attention is a state of passive monitoring of our environment that allows external events to trigger bottom-up attention. Low attention is also the mode of attention we allocate to other things when we’re paying high attention to one thing.
High attention is what many advertisers have traditionally assumed advertising must achieve to be effective. But as we’ve seen, viewers are seldom engaged in high attention when they see ads in a natural setting. Instead, most of the attention we devote to advertising is now understood to be low attention, not high attention.
It shouldn’t be that surprising that high attention would be a lofty aspirational goal for most advertising. After all, we’re exposed to approximately 3,500 to 5,000 ads every day. It would be disastrous for all our other daily goals if we had to pay active attention to all of them. So, we’ve developed some natural resistance strategies in our nonconscious (or pre-attentive) processing of ads. We filter them out. We activate corrective goals against efforts to persuade us.
In many circumstances, high attention to advertising may not be such a good idea. Ads are usually interruptions. They’re a nuisance we put up with to get other things we want, like TV shows or online videos. So, our default response to any ad that grabs our attention is just as likely to be negative as positive, which is exactly the emotional connection that advertisers want to avoid for their products and brands.
You are now officially persuaded
We devote a section of Chapter 8 to the limits of persuasive messaging in consumer decision making. We won’t repeat those points here other than to say that traditional persuasion is often made irrelevant by three characteristics of consumer buying decisions:
Many consumer decisions bypass conscious deliberation, so they leave no opportunity for persuasive messaging to impact purchase decisions.
In the absence of conscious deliberation, purchase decisions are more likely to be influenced by heuristics and choice architectures (the way choices are presented in the shopping environment) than by any persuasive message from advertising.
Many purchase decisions are habitual, triggered by environmental cues, and carried out automatically without conscious oversight, including any active recall of persuasive arguments from advertising.
Of course, there are buying situations in which persuasion isn’t irrelevant, especially when the product or category is new or novel, or when the purpose of the ad is to convince the viewer to take a direct action, like make a donation or call a toll-free number to buy the product being advertised. Then persuasive advertising can have a significant impact. But for most of the things that consumers buy every day, the traditional idea of persuasion is simply not a part of the buying equation.
Read it back to me
In our discussion of memory and brands in Chapter 9, we describe two types of long-term memory: explicit and implicit. The kind of memory assumed to operate in the direct route is explicit memory, because it’s tested by asking people what they can consciously recall from a particular experience in the past — in this case, an ad. It ends up that this simple and obvious question has some big repercussions.
When advertisers and market researchers first thought to test advertising effectiveness by asking people if they remembered seeing an ad, they were probably unaware of the whole implicit-explicit memory distinction. But when they took the answer to this question as their primary measure of ad effectiveness — ad recall — they essentially cut themselves off from measuring implicit memory. And in doing so, they missed a major way in which advertising actually works in human memory.
Because linking advertising directly to sales is difficult, ad recall evolved into a kind of surrogate measure for ad effectiveness. As we note earlier, the logic seemed impeccable — if you need to remember an ad in order for it to influence you at a point of sale, then an ad that is better remembered is more likely to play that role (all else being equal).
Some observers of advertising feel that this equation has caused at least some advertisers to strive for explicit memory at all costs — by being louder, more obnoxious, more shocking, or more irritating than other ads. Apparently embracing an idea akin to the principle that “There is no bad publicity,” some advertising seems to be based on the idea that “There are no bad memories.” A quick glance through Part II of this book provides many examples of why this is not the case.
In addition, direct research on the predictive impact of recall on sales hasn’t been kind. A large body of studies, by both academics and practitioners, has found very little relationship between ad recall and sales or market share. The consensus view seems to be that picking ads on the basis of recall is about equivalent to flipping a coin. In a way, this is good news. The failure of recall to predict sales implies that some other process must be at work for those ads that do have a significant impact on sales, at least sometimes.
Taking the Indirect Route to Advertising Effectiveness
The indirect route to advertising effectiveness eventually arrives at the same destination as the direct route, but it differs considerably in how it gets there. Instead of depending on high attention, it focuses on low attention. Instead of relying on explicit persuasion, it relies on priming and repetitive conditioning. Instead of aiming at creating explicit memories, it emphasizes the creation of implicit memories. And finally, instead of trying to impact sales directly, it focuses on impacting brand equity, which then carries the burden of influencing purchase behavior at the point of sale.
Advertising and low-attention processing
The idea that low attention may be better for advertising effectiveness than high attention was first introduced by Herbert Krugman in the 1960s and has been pursued by Robert Heath since 2001, most extensively in his 2012 book, Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising (Wiley-Blackwell).
Evidence for low-attention processing of advertising has been growing since the 1990s. An influential early study published by Stuart Shapiro and colleagues in 1997 showed that advertising placed at the edge of people’s vision, accompanied by a study task that forced them to keep all their attention focused centrally, still affected the products they later selected when asked to create a shopping list. When simple ads for carrots and a can opener were displayed, those products showed up more often on the shopping lists, even though people weren’t aware of seeing the ads. The study confirmed that advertising could influence choice without requiring high attention.
Most people can accept the idea that too much attention may not be good for advertising effectiveness. Advertising is generally an interruption, not something we actively seek out, and many ad claims are pretty weak or silly if you make the effort to actually think about them. But the other side of the argument is more challenging: How can less attention lead to more brand favorability?
The answer comes in two parts, which we discuss in the next two sections:
It has to do with how human brains respond emotionally to sensory stimuli. We generate emotional responses before we pay attention, so attention isn’t required to create the emotional connections that underlie priming and conditioning.
It has to do with memory. Emotional associations established at low levels of attention lead to longer-lasting influences on attitudes and behavior than rational arguments, because they trigger implicit rather than explicit memories.
Dissecting the feel-good ad
Some ads seem to violate all the rules of traditional advertising effectiveness. They don’t clamor for your attention. They contain no persuasive arguments. They barely mention the product at all, perhaps only with a low-key logo display at the end of the ad. They usually tell an emotionally engaging story, often set to catchy music, that has little to do with the product or brand, except for a subtle suggestion that the advertiser shares the positive values illustrated in the ad.
Yet, despite these violations, such ads can be highly effective. Although reliable data on financial performance of ad campaigns is hard to come by, one respected source is the Databank (http://staging.ipa.autometrics.com) from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which contains over 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Awards competition over three decades. Researchers classified these campaigns as emotional, rational, or mixed in their basic appeal. They found that campaigns containing exclusively emotional content were twice as likely to produce very large profit gains than campaigns that emphasized rational content (31 percent versus 16 percent). Campaigns that mixed some emotional content with rational content also performed better than purely rational campaigns (26 percent versus 16 percent). According to these findings, emotional advertising works better than rational advertising where it matters: at the bottom line.
But how do these ads work? The answer begins with the way we process emotional input. As we explain in Chapter 5, emotional responses are primarily preconscious. We have circuitry in our brains that allows us to make a rapid emotional assessment of objects in our environment (creating emotional markers) well before we’re consciously aware of them. By the time we notice something, the object has already been “tagged” with an emotional marker that tells us whether it’s something we should approach or avoid. This process is highly efficient for our cognitive miser minds, because it occurs without the expenditure of costly cognitive resources required for conscious deliberation.
These emotional responses then get associated with the advertised brand through the psychological process of conditioning, in which responses to one object (the emotions generated by the ad) get transferred to another object (the brand). The mechanism by which conditioning occurs couldn’t be simpler; it’s repetition — the repeated presentation of the emotional response and the brand together.
Technically, this is the process of affective conditioning, which is different from classical conditioning, the process illustrated in the famous “Pavlov’s dogs” experiment. In affective conditioning, emotions associated with an ad aren’t just triggered by later exposure to the brand — they become an integral part of the brand identity.
Consider any of the strongest brand associations you can think of — achievement and Nike, creativity and Apple, safety and Michelin, family and Disney — all these associations have been built up by years and years of consistent conditioning through advertising (and other forms of marketing) that tied the two concepts together in your mind. And it all happened without any conscious effort on your part. This is because conditioning is an implicit learning process, using implicit memory to create associations in your long-term memory without your conscious effort or involvement.
Conditioning, unlike logical persuasion, doesn’t require attention to create learning. Indeed, attention may actually inhibit nonconscious conditioning, because it triggers (nonconscious) correction goals and (conscious) counterarguing in the mind of the viewer. This is why some researchers, like Robert Heath, argue that attention is not only difficult to achieve for most advertising, but would actually be detrimental to advertising effectiveness if it could be achieved, because it would disrupt the real mechanism by which advertising operates.
Catch you later: Learning without listening
Explicit memory requires effort, fades relatively quickly, and has to be reinforced regularly. But implicit memory is triggered effortlessly and lasts indefinitely. Place a brand in an emotionally engaging ad, repeat the association under low-attention conditions like TV watching, and you’ll get both implicit memory formation and a favorable default attitude toward your brand.
Implicit memory creates associations at two levels: perceptual and conceptual. Perceptual associations have to do with physical similarities. Conceptual associations have to do with thematic connections or meanings. Ad-based conditioning is usually about creating and reinforcing conceptual associations, because the purpose of the ad is to change your concept of the brand.
Implicit memory has some extraordinary properties. It operates automatically, outside our conscious awareness, so we have no direct control over it. It doesn’t depend on attention. It has a huge capacity compared to explicit memory. It endures for much longer periods of time than explicit memory. And it can’t be voluntarily recalled, so it remains invisible to all forms of self-reported recall testing.
A final important property of implicit memory formation is that it can’t be consciously evaluated and double-checked by our conscious minds. The implication for consumers is that we’re carrying a lot of implicit associations around in our heads that have been created by advertising but not subjected to any kind of evaluative scrutiny. This would be quite worrisome if the only way we interacted with products or brands was through advertising. But luckily, we actually use products and brands, so direct experience is also a part of our memories, attitudes, and expectations. The slickest advertising campaign can’t overcome the reality of a pizza that tastes like cardboard.
Using Neuromarketing to Test Advertising
It’s no coincidence that traditional research methods tend to be used to measure the direct route to advertising effectiveness. The methods and the model essentially grew up together. Some researchers have argued that this closeness creates a problem — that advertisers who rely on traditional methods will only produce direct-route advertising, because that’s the kind of advertising that “wins” on those kinds of measures. There is, indeed, some risk of this, and we believe neuromarketing measures can provide a useful supplement to traditional measures for testing direct-route advertising.
But the real benefit of neuromarketing measures is their ability to address the testing requirements of indirect-route advertising, which gains much of its power from responses that occur below conscious awareness and, therefore, cannot be tested using the self-reporting measures of traditional advertising research. Neuromarketing draws upon the same methods that have been used in academic research to uncover the dynamics of the indirect route: low-attention processing, nonconscious emotional reactions, conditioning, implicit learning, brand associations, and buying behavior.
Tracking attention, high and low
Attention to advertising can be measured in real time using several techniques (for more details, see Chapter 16). Two of the most popular are as follows:
Eye tracking: Using standard eye-tracking hardware and software, it’s possible to measure the number of fixations per second (fps) when a person is viewing an ad. This measure has been found to be sensitive to cognitive load (the amount of information being processed consciously), which increases the more active attention is being paid to an ad. When our brains are actively taking in information, our eyes tend to jump more rapidly from place to place in the visual field, and we devote less time to each fixation.
Electroencephalography (EEG): For a more direct measure of attention, changes in certain brain-wave patterns over regions of the scalp can be used to detect changes in top-down attention. Decreasing alpha wave activity over the frontal brain areas, for example, can be converted into a reliable moment-to-moment measure of attention.
Measuring attention is only the first step. Equally important is interpreting the attention measure. For advertising that takes the indirect route to effectiveness, we want to see low attention, not high. For advertising that takes the direct route, we want to see the opposite. In either case, to accurately measure this effect, it’s important to test advertising in a natural viewing context. To get a realistic simulation of a natural TV ad viewing experience, we suggest telling people they’re going to watch a TV show, and then show them ads as part of an unannounced ad break, just like in real life.
Monitoring emotional reactions
A positive emotional reaction to advertising stands at the center of the indirect route to effectiveness. Positive, approach-oriented emotions result from many attributes we’ve discussed in previous chapters, such as processing fluency and familiarity. Brain science tells us that a short but pleasant ad, viewed multiple times, will reliably produce stronger positive feelings toward the product and brand, even if the product has little logically to do with the pleasant experience.
Three techniques are commonly used by neuromarketers to measure emotional responses to advertising:
Electromyography (EMG): This technique measures micro-level activation of muscles in the face that are involuntarily associated with emotional reactions, such as the “frown” and “smile” muscles.
Facial expression analysis: Several software programs provide automatic classification of observable facial expressions while watching ads. Some of these programs can be implemented through webcams, allowing a scalable way to test across large samples of viewers.
EEG measurement of approach-avoidance: Relative activations of certain brain-wave frequencies in the left and right frontal areas of the brain have been found to be good indicators of nonconscious approach-and-avoidance motivation. Tracked over time while a viewer is watching an ad, this measure can identify precisely what moments of the ad are contributing most to approach or avoidance responses.
Testing for the right things
Ultimately, the key to successful ad testing is being sure you know what the advertiser is trying to accomplish. If the ad is for a new product with great new features that change the game in its category, you want to go for all the attributes of a successful direct-route ad — high attention, a persuasive message, and high recall. You’ll want to look for novelty and attraction, nonconscious and conscious goal activation, and both implicit and explicit memory activation. You’ll want to do significant testing at the point of sale, determining what product packaging, shelf locations, and merchandising displays trigger the memories laid down by the advertising. You’ll feel more comfortable asking people what they think about your ad and product, because the ad is meant to work largely at a conscious level.
If, on the other hand, you’re testing an ad meant to bolster or reinforce the brand equity of a familiar product with positive emotional associations, you want to test for a successful indirect-route execution — low attention, high positive emotion, less recall, and more implicit memory activation. You’ll want to focus more on brand-equity effects of the ad than you would for a direct-route ad. You’ll be more suspicious of self-reporting measures, because much of what you’re trying to accomplish with the ad is occurring at a nonconscious level. You’ll still want to tie your ad testing to point-of-sale testing, because you’ll still want to know how your ad impacts actual behavior.
Ad testing is one of the most obvious areas in which neuromarketing research techniques can add real value to traditional techniques. As we learn more about how advertising really works, we’ll see more potential for neuromarketing measures that provide access to mental responses occurring below the level of conscious awareness.
The potential payoff isn’t just more effective ads. If advertising could lessen its preoccupation with attention at all costs, we suspect it would become a much less irritating and vexing intrusion in consumers’ lives. And if the focus on driving home a sometimes strident persuasive message could be softened a bit, we believe both advertisers and consumers would heave a sigh of relief.