I'm currently reading a paper by Dr. Robert Heath and Dr. Paul Feldwick from the University of Bath called "50 Years using the wrong model of TV advertising". As the title implies, the paper looks back at 50 years of TV and brand advertising marketing effectiveness, so it will take a little time to digest (especially in trying to take the implications and assertions covered and apply them to an online market) but my immediate thoughts are "Omigod! We have a lot to figure out here."

Return of the Hidden Persuaders

Heath and Feldwick assert that you don't have to pay a lot of attention to an ad for it to be effective. In fact, they resurrect many of assertions that Vance Packard made back in the 50's with his blockbuster book The Hidden Persuaders. Packard's claims about the subliminal power of advertising have been largely discredited or ignored because of  the infamous Fort Lee, New Jersey case of subliminal ads (two frames, one of Coke and one of a bag of popcorn, were shown for 1/3000th of a second every 5 seconds in the movie) in a movie theater, supposedly increasing sales of Coke by 18.1% and popcorn by 57.8%. The experiment was held by James Vicary, but he was unable to reproduce the findings later in a follow up supervised by outside parties

Traditional thinking, supported by market effectiveness research, makes some assumptions about what makes an ad work:

    •    For any ad to be effective, it must first attract attention and the active involvement of the viewer
    •    The advertising process is essentially a one way, communication from the advertiser to the consumer
    •    The role played by creativity and emotional elements is to support this communication, either by fostering liking of the advertising which transfers to the brand, or by increasing attention

This model, which depends on the processing of the information in the ad, is supported by most attempts to measure ad effectiveness, which track things like awareness and recall. All of these measures depend on engagement of the cortical regions of the brain. They rely on the focusing of attention and cognitive engagement with the ads. In fact, this notion of engagement, of being "tuned in" to an ad, is the basis of the Advertising Research Foundations call for a new ad effectiveness metric. The drive has been to find a way to measure engagement.

Gut Instinct

But there are some assumptions in this model that may not be fully supported by current thinking in neuroscience and psychology. Heath and Feldwick cite Damasio's Somatic Marker hypothesis as one fly in the ointment of the "Information Processing" model of advertising effectiveness. Damasio's theory provides academic support for something very human that has proven resistant to most attempts to measure it in a lab setting. He calls it somatic markers. You know it better as "gut instinct". Damasio's research (and others, including Joseph LeDoux) has provided compelling evidence that there is more than one way for us to process information. We have the rational route, where we carefully consider and weigh information to come up with the most logical answer. And then there is the "quick and dirty" route, where signals take short cuts through the subcortical parts of the brain (where emotion and our older evolutionary instincts live) and provide a rough and ready human guidance system. These short cuts provide an almost instantaneous emotional foundation that may prompt us to take immediate action (jumping back from a snake or slamming on the brake when a child runs in front of our car). The rational route is simply too slow to keep us alive in these situations.

It appears that these initial responses, the quick and dirty release of emotions, don't get overridden by the slower rational loop when it finally catches up. In fact, we tend to hammer our rationalization into shape to support our first "gut instincts". If they don't fit, we suffer from cognitive dissonance. Something just doesn't feel right. Malcolm Gladwell called it "Blink".

The important thing to keep in mind here about how this impacts advertising is that much of the input filtered in gut instinct flies in under the radar of rational thought. Our cortical systems that drive rational thought, although powerful when focused, simply move at far too slow a pace to keep up with the torrential flow of stimuli of our world. If we had to think about everything we saw our heads would explode. So, the stimuli gets processed at the sub-cortical level and only a few things get passed up the cortical chain for further processing. That, according to the Information Processing model, is the big challenge faced by advertising.

Advertising Flying Under the Radar

This was where Heath and Feldwick jumped in. "What if," they speculated, "the whole Information Processing model was wrong? What if we processed ads the same way Damasio theorized we process the rest of the information thrown at us in our lives. What if the most effective aspects of advertising flew in under the radar?"

Heath and Feldwick start the paper with an example of a UK ad for a snack food featuring a pop song and surreal visual scenes that failed miserably in controlled testing. The metrics used were all based on the Information Processing model. These are the standard metrics typically used to measure ad effectiveness: ease of understanding, believability, relevance, branding and persuasion. The ad failed on all scores. The research report came to pessimistic conclusion:


The advertiser, because of a lack of time, decided to ignore the test results and ran the ad anyway. The ad was a huge success in the marketplace, generating buzz, making the song a pop hit and, most importantly, allowing the brand to capture a substantial market share.

What happened? How could an ad that failed so miserably in a lab perform so well in the real world? And this is not a unique case. The problem with most market research is that in trying to quantify human behavior, it often gets it completely wrong. Labs aren't the real world. Human behavior isn't something that can be measured by a gauge or monitor.

Advertising is a Personal Experience

We absorb advertising in the context of our surroundings. Sometimes we absorb it consciously, sometimes it seeps in under the threshold of awareness. And when advertising does filter into our skulls, through whatever route, it gets mixed in with a mysterious concoction of emotions, beliefs and feelings that precedes it and is unique to each one of us. Even the social setting we're in at the time of exposure colors how we feel about advertising. We feel differently about ads we see with friends than those we watch in a lab. How could you possibly get an accurate measurement of this in a lab setting?

Heath and Feldwick also share the results of research they conducted that show that emotional ads actually require less attention to process. This runs directly counter to the Information Processing model. Ads like the snack food commercial that have what it takes to slip in under the conscious threshold might actually be more effective because they take the "quick and dirty" route to our emotions, rather than demand the heavy lifting of the cortex. And, because they do slip in without a lot of conscious intervention, they will score miserably on any standard ad effectiveness measure.

In Enquiro's research, we've actually seen similar results that hint at the same thing. There seems to be an inverse relationship between how hard an ad has to work and how effective it is. There is still much work that needs to be done to understand how online advertising influences us, but I think Heath and Feldwick's findings raise some serious doubts about how thorough our understanding of true advertising effectiveness is.

Advertising: Going Beyond "Salesmanship in Print"

The question is, if Heath and Feldwick are right, or even partially right, how do you take a systematic approach to improving the effectiveness of your advertising program? This gets to the really difficult part of advertising, where intent is triggered or brand affinities are first formed. Advertising has long sought to measure this effect in humans. Direct response effectiveness can be measured because reduces the variables to a manageable level. Direct response takes the John E. Kennedy/Albert Lasker approach to advertising: it's "salesmanship in print". for the first part of the 20th century, this was the role of advertising - to effect conscious (and hopefully, immediate) persuasion. And this was measurable. You present a sales message to someone and you measure whether they have been effectively persuaded based on some action they take - i.e. purchasing your product. It's this same logic that's applied to measuring search marketing effectiveness (valid in some cases, not in others).

But when you move up the awareness chain, accurate measurement becomes an impossible task. A successful outcome is an incremental gain in positive "mindshare". If the mind was a jar you could measure the volume of or a path that you could determine the length of, you might be able to measure your progress. But the human mind is the most complex output ever produced by evolution. As Heath and Feldwick's findings show, the mind doesn't go down predictable paths and the further you move away from a measurable event, quantifying the impact of any particular influence becomes exponentially more difficult. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is what makes attribution models so difficult to determine. They tend to arbitrarily measure the things that are easiest to measure, and guess at the rest.

Advertising has been desperately seeking a way to predict the likelihood of ad effectiveness. We have thrown a handful of logical, rational metrics at the problem and when we stop to think about it, we convince ourselves that it should work. The problem is that we're throwing rational metrics at an irrational process. We have tried to turn the art of advertising into a science, and it has so far resisted our efforts to do so.

I don't think there is a way to predict fabulously successful advertising. I don't believe there is some hidden formula or algorithm that will reveal itself with enough prying in a sterile lab environment. I think the best advertising, the stuff that goes beyond the John Caples "salesmanship in print" approach to the place where it stirs our emotions and sinks into the darkest depths of our brains, gets read by our guts, not our brains. There is no measurable meter. There is only a visceral connection. And these ads can't be measured and manufactured. They hit us at a gut level and they get created as the same level. They are sparks of ideas that come from our humanness. The great ads connect "gut to gut."

Good luck measuring that.

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