How hard does an ad have to work to do it's job?
That seems to be a question that keeps coming up. As I've said before, when the content of the ad is aligned with our current intent, we've found that ads don't have to work very hard at all. All they need is a few lines of relevant text. Which is all well and good, if the right intent has been planted.
So, how hard does an ad have to work to shift intent and get the whole process going? Again, in my past post on attribution models, I suggested that the heaviest lifting may be done by the ads that somehow manage to shift intent and send it off in a new direction. This is a herculean mental task and once intent is successfully planted, you have the advantage of your prospect's attention being focused on you.
It's that switching of cognitive gears that all the brand advertising in the world tries to accomplish. Obviously, this is a huge question with many parts. One of those parts, the role of emotion, was explored in a recent study. UK Professor
Robert Heath (more about Heath in future posts). What
Heath found is that advertising that employs emotion doesn't tax the brain as much as a rational appeal. This makes sense. Emotion hits us at the sub cortical level, the most efficient part of the brain. Evolution has engineered this part of the brain to respond in a "quick and dirty" fashion to the base needs presented by our environment: the need to love and bond, the need to eat and the need to run away to save ourselves. The second loop, the harder working loop, is the rational processing that happens at the cortical level. This is the type of thinking that gears up the frontal lobes, requiring us to weigh options, make choices and support those choices with rational reasons. The nasty little secret in all of this is that most of our rationalization is simply false. Our emotions guide our guts in one direction and we falsely rationalize it so we can stay aligned with our gut instincts.
The longer the decision process, the more emotions play a part. And, as Dr. Heath and his colleagues found, a lot of this emotional subtext can filter in without us even noticing it. It plants the seeds at a subliminal level (I'll be sharing a fascinating example of this from the UK in a post later this week). So, if we're buying a car, planning a trip or moving to a new house, there is a rich and impossible-to-ignore foundation of emotional influence being laid, that we later try to rationalize to make it align with the rational side of our brain.
This happens in all types of purchasing. It was what we found over and over again in the B2B buying behaviours of companies in the
BuyerSphere Project. Even in this supposedly ultra-rational marketplace, emotion ruled as corporate buyers went to extremes to avoid risk, the primary emotional motivator in the B2B marketplace.
Over the weekend I had a ton of new things to consider about how advertising works dumped into my lap, sparked by a quick email from Gian Fulgoni at comScore. I'll try to sort through them over the Christmas break (when my plan is to spend a little more time organizing my blog feeds) and fashioning them into somewhat cohesive thoughts here in the blog.
Thanks Gian..I feel that Santa came early this year!