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Monday, February 06, 2006

Marketing: Neuroscience

Watch the superbowl? I did. But what I didn't do was watch it while strapped into a brain-scanning machine.

Never fear, some lucky people got to at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center.

The boffins looked to see which of the superbowl ads got the neurons firing most, and which least... And these were not necessarily those which the lucky guinea pigs volunteers claimed to like the most:

"Who won the Super Bowl ads competition? If a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy, two winners seem to be the 'I am going to Disney' ad and the Bud 'office' ad. In contrast, two big floppers seem to be the Bud 'secret fridge' ad and the Aleve ad. What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas"

Those probably weren't my favourites... Mind you, my neurons were probably a little scrambled by too many, er, pretzels and beer.

What this tells us about how to make better superbowl ads remains unclear.

1 comment:

AKI SYSTEMS 2600 said...

bah, who needs a neuro-ray-ionizer to tell you that the secret to more effective ads is CUTE ANIMALS. ponies, bunnies, kittens, ducks, monkeys. SUREFIRE HITS EVERYTIME! who doesn't like a monkey? c'mon everybody loves a monkey! i vote for more monkeys in ads! you can never go wrong with a monkey. and monkeys are so adaptable to so many types of products. take this bit of free advice to bank...