How to use neuroscience to improve your advertising

Heather Andrew
Source: WARC Best Practice, December 2018
Downloaded from WARC

This paper addresses the implications of this changing research landscape and, in particular, how
neuroscience principles can help marketers and advertisers to:.

Understand the ways in which a brand lives in the brain – and how marketing can either help a
brand grow its associations among an audience, or to activate its brand equity at the optimal
moment.
Use memory encoding as a crucial metric for determining advertising effectiveness.
Understand brain response on a second-by-second basis; important not just in optimising creative
executions but also in mitigating the potential effects of conceptual closure, which can lead to
poor brand linkage and, ultimately, ineffective messaging.
Take account of the impact of neurostates, which help explain the relationship between media
environments and the content they deliver.

Jump to:
Definitions | Where to start | Essentials | Implications | Further reading

As advertisers and agencies pursue greater efficiency and effectiveness across the marketing mix, there is an
increasing focus on performance and accountability. One of the consequences is the emergence of new means
of assessment and measurement, and neuroscience is one of the key approaches that has emerged in this
context. By focusing on the subconscious drivers of behaviour, neuroscience offers a way of understanding the
link between creative and media choices and the ultimate effectiveness of a campaign.

This paper addresses the implications of this changing research landscape and, in particular, how neuroscience
principles can help deliver more effective brand communications.

Definitions
Neuroscience

Neuroscience, in a marketing research context, refers to methodologies which measure what people think and
feel. By removing the need for speech-based response, neuroscience methodologies can report objectively on
responses from our subconscious. In particular, neuroscience helps us get a handle on emotional responses
and memory, which are both crucial for marketers. Emotional communication that isn’t remembered is essentially
no more than great entertainment – to have an impact it needs to be encoded or stored into memory. So whilst
emotion is key, memory is vital too – and the most valuable neuroscience measures will give a reading on both.

NB: academia and laboratory processes have refined neuroscientific research methodologies greatly through
the years; the most robust and effective methodologies are those which have been published and peer reviewed
by the scientific community.

Long-term memory encoding

Long-term memory encoding measures not what is already in memory, but what is being stored, or laid down, on
a second by second basis as people engage with something. “Long-term” means effectively anything that is
stored for more than a few minutes, which could mean anything from a few hours to a lifetime. It is recorded for
both the left brain (associated with words and detail) and right brain (more emotional or holistic aspects of
processing).

Memory encoding is a key metric for marketers, because it correlates with decision-making and purchase intent
and, as a result, is a strong indicator of advertising effectiveness.

Neurostates

Neurostates describe the polarity of brain response to every piece of communication that we see, whether it’s an
ad or a piece of content.

Our brains are bi-lateral in nature, comprising the left brain (which tracks detail and is also responsible for
language, facts and figures), and our right brain (which tends to process the ‘big picture’ and emotional thrust of
a message). The extent to which a piece of stimulus evokes left brain or right brain responses is what we call its
neurostate.

Crucially, our neurostates don’t change instantly when new content is presented. Instead, we tend to be more
receptive to content that has a similar neurostate to whatever preceded it, and less to that which doesn’t
resonate.

Where to start
The drive to understand audience attitudes and responses to communication has underpinned advertising
strategies from the earliest days of marketing. Historically the focus has been on surveys or interviews,
designed to understand conscious take-out and opinions, but this reliance on stated responses has always
overlooked the fact that a large part of our decision-making takes place at a sub-conscious level. As the media
landscape has become increasingly complex, and the importance of emotional, as opposed to purely rational
drivers of behaviour has become accepted in the marketing community, this has become more and more of an
issue.

Of course, traditional approaches like surveys and panels can give perfectly good information in many
circumstances – there’s no need to use neuroscience to find out whether someone has a car or a pet, or how
often they go shopping. And online analytics have facilitated a level of granular behavioural data that early
marketers could not have possibly conceived. However, there are many circumstances where it’s not enough to
know simply what people do (or say they do), and many of the deepest insights can come from responses that
people may not consciously perceive at all.

More specifically, questioning people using language-based methodologies has an inherent problem, reflecting
the way that our brains are structured. The two hemispheres of the brain are specialised – the left brain is more
detail-focused and tends to be more rational, whilst the right brain responds to things at a more holistic level and
tends to be associated with more emotional responses. Much of our decision-making takes place in the right
hemisphere, and yet most of our language capability resides in the left, so if researches ask people about an
experience or the reasons for a decision, what happens in the right hemisphere has to be “translated” into
speech by the more rational left brain. This inevitably tends to have the effect of warping the actual experience –
the left brain will put a spin on it and articulate things in a way that may not reflect the reality of the actual
experience.

Neuroscience based research can help to overcome this issue, by giving a direct view of underlying
subconscious processes. It can reveal details of engagement, emotional response and memory encoding that
may not feature at all in terms of conscious awareness, and allows marketers to look beyond claimed
motivations to understand what is really going on in people’s heads and the likely impact on future actions and
decisions. It can help marketers understand two sides of communications planning:

Content: The impact of brand communication in its widest sense.

Context: The impact of the environment in which that content is delivered. This could be surrounding
programming, channels, platforms, devices or even the physical environment.

There are many different kinds of neuroscience measures out there, which can be split into biometric and brain
imaging methodologies. Each has strengths and weaknesses and its own role in marketing research – enough
for a paper of its own:

Brain imaging:

fMRI: measures blood flow in the brain to build a picture of what part of the brain is active. When part of the
brain activates, it uses a combination of electricity and chemical signals, which use up energy; and blood
flows in to replace the energy that is lost – this is what the fMRI machine measures.
fMRI is the best way to look deep into the brain – most of the knowledge we have about the specialisation
of different parts of the brain comes from fMRI. It can create a 3D picture and measure multiple different
cognitive functions, not just a single dimension like some of the biometric methodologies.

There are drawbacks, however. fMRI is expensive and is an unnatural environment for research. Also,
because blood flow is a delayed response, it is not particularly good at measuring rapid responses in real
time.

EEG: measures electrical response on the surface of the scalp, which is indicative of underlying brain
activity. It can’t look as deeply into the brain as fMRI, but can measure responses in parts of the brain that
are close to the surface.
Because it measures electrical activity, which is an instant response, EEG can measure fast changes in
real time and, compared to fMRI, is less expensive and less unnatural. However, it does require studies to
be carried out in a special lab, and generally requires multiple readings from each respondent, because
there tends to be a lot of “noise” in the data. EEG signals can suffer from interference and some results
can be ambiguous.
 SST: Like EEG, SST measures fast changes in real time, but it doesn’t require a lab environment because
there is a high level of resistance to interference or “noise” in the data. The robust nature of the data also
means it only requires one reading from each respondent. This in turn enhances data quality and keeps
costs down.
NB: SST is Neuro-Insight’s proprietary and patented technology.

Biometric:

Eye-tracking: Monitors eye movement as people look at moving or still stimulus. Can be done using either
glasses/headsets which are portable, so can be used in store, for example; or can use a fixed unit to
monitor the eyes from in front of the viewer. Is good in situations where there is a lot of detail in front of
people and you want to know where their attention is landing.
Facial coding: Measures changes in facial muscles to indicate emotional response to a stimulus. Some
approaches involve manual coding by people, although many now used automated systems. Facial coding
is really good for measuring specific sub-conscious emotional responses.
Galvanic skin response and/or heartrate monitors: Measure changes in skin conductivity and
heartrate (respectively) as people are exposed to communication. Emotional response will cause
physiological reactions (e.g. sweating, changes in heart rate) that can be picked up by measuring
instruments. Unlike facial coding, doesn’t tell you what the emotion is, but does tell you the level of (second
by second) intensity.

Implicit research:

Implicit testing is a measure of sub-conscious cognitive processing. It doesn’t involve actual brain imaging, but
it’s still measuring brain response at a level that people aren’t aware of, by looking at the time people take to
respond to something in front of them.

Some implicit methodologies are simple response time tests – how quickly can people identify something? This
is used, for example, to look at how quickly people relate a particular word or image to brand and is sometimes
used to draw conclusions about the strength of association between a brand and words/pictures.

However, there is a more robust approach – something called “contextual priming”, where people’s response
time is dependent on prior priming by a word or image. This is a much more reliable indicator of the
subconscious links between brands and associations.

The rationale behind contextual priming is the understanding that our brains work by association. If we hear a
word or see an image, our existing associations with that word or image mean that our brains are already cued
to have certain expectations of what might come next.

If what we see or hear immediately afterwards is congruent with our expectations, we respond to it fractionally
more quickly than if it is incongruent.

Essentials
A useful starting point when considering the neuroscience in marketing is to take a broad view of how our brains
understand and relate to brands; with clear implications for creative development, media planning and shaping
the customer journey.
Understanding the “brand room”

We express this broad view of the brain’s relationship with brands by using the metaphor of the “brand room”. In
our heads we carry networks of associations for the things that we encounter in our lives – people, places or, in
the marketing context, brands. As we gather new information about these things, our memories link it by
association to our existing knowledge and the networks grow. We can think about these networks as “rooms” in
our heads, with one for each brand we come across. The rooms we hold for familiar and loved brands will be
well-decorated and furnished with lots of associations, and the feeling of the room will reflect all our experiences
and impressions about the brand to date. Rooms for brands that we know less well will, in contrast, be more
sparsely furnished.

Advertising, along with other brand touchpoints, plays an important role in helping to furnish or re-decorate these
rooms by giving new information or changing perceptions of the brand. Effectively this is how brand equity
grows, by creating new associations that help to furnish the brand rooms in our heads.

However, we don’t go around thinking about brands all the time, and as a result these rooms mostly sit in
darkness. But if they’re not illuminated, even the best furnished brand room can’t influence our choices. In
order, therefore, to leverage hard-won elements of brand equity at the critical moments when purchase
decisions are being made, brands need to illuminate the room by triggering metaphorical light switches.

Brand logos are the most obvious examples of triggers, but any aspect of brand iconography can work. Shapes,
colours, sounds and images can act as effective triggers when they are well associated with a brand, evoking
associations and feelings that it contains. Specific elements of individual pieces of brand communication can
also act in this way. In our research we identify these as “iconic triggers™” and they are key to leveraging the
impact of branding and brand communication along the path to purchase.

This analogy doesn’t address all the complexity of our media landscape, but it does imply two key tasks for
marketers and planners:

1. To identify the triggers that work for a brand and to deliver them consistently across media and channels.
2. To form a clear view about the role of any piece of brand communication. Is it for furnishing new or better
brand associations? If so, it needs to deliver new information or build emotional connections. Alternatively,
is it going to act as a light switch? If that’s the case then communication needs to be single-minded,
focusing simply on delivering one or more brand triggers as clearly and strongly as possible.

Appealing to neuro-states

The brand room metaphor can help give a new perspective on the role of different types of brand
communication, but of course the story doesn’t end there. It’s vital also for marketers to understand the
relationship between context, in the form of media environments, and the content that they carry.

There is a very real carry-over effect from editorial to advertising, clearly illustrated by a study we carried out to
understand the “neuro-states” associated with television viewing.

We define a neuro-state as the balance between left and right brain activity:

Left brain is associated with words and detail of a scene

Right brain is associated with picking out a holistic view or overall ‘feel’ of something
Every media environment, and indeed every piece of advertising has a neuro-state. It might elicit a
predominantly left-brain response, or be right brain biased, or sit somewhere in the middle.

In researching the relationship between TV programmes and advertising, we found that, where an ad was
viewed in a programme with the same neuro-state, the level of memory encoding elicited by the ad was on
average 25% higher than where the neuro-state was unmatched. Put simply, that’s like delivering 25% more
TVRs simply by placing the ad in an appropriate programme context.

Contextual impact goes beyond left brain/right brain polarity, however. The quality of context has a huge impact
too, and numerous studies have demonstrated that environments delivering high quality content which is also
relevant to the audience elicits stronger and more positive responses to the advertising that it contains.

Working with Teads in the US, we identified that video content performed particularly well in the context of high
quality editorial content. In the UK, a recent study for AOP/Newsworks showed how advertising delivered on
premium publisher sites was associated with higher and more positive brain responses than the same content
delivered via social media (and indeed both those environments elicited stronger responses than more general
internet browsing).

Using creative tools to boost memory encoding

So there are some key applications for neuroscience in the media space but of course context can only deliver
so far and content is, of course, crucial.

While there is no recipe for ‘the perfect ad’ (thank goodness, because of course it’s impossible to deconstruct
creativity) – there are key ingredients that can boost an advertiser’s chances of driving memory encoding around
their brand and key messages. Understanding these can help maximise the effectiveness of any advertising,
turning an averagely creative ad into a good one, and potentially making a good one great.

One key driver of memory is emotional intensity. There’s a Darwinian explanation for the link between a strong
emotional response and memory – it’s in our evolutionary interests to remember emotionally charged events like
coming across a predator, or finding an amazing source of food. So we naturally remember stand-out moments
of anger, fear, joy or frustration; these will drive the formation of memories, and will colour our future responses
when those memories are evoked. We often remember significant events in our lives in vivid detail because of
their intense emotional charge.

For John Lewis, understanding and crafting a powerful emotional response has contributed strongly to the
success of its campaigns – typically, a sentimental tone that plays on nostalgia, innocence and personal bonds.
At Christmas in particular, John Lewis has managed to ‘own’ a feeling. This is an enormous strength, not just in
the impact of the retailer’s own ads, but also because its appropriation of an emotional positioning means that it
can benefit from other brands that try to communicate in a similar way. A weakly-branded ad which delivers an
emotional experience that is evocative of John Lewis’ advertising may end up creating strong associations which
the brain attributes, by default, to John Lewis itself, being the brand that has most existing associations with that
emotion.

So brands can harness the evolutionary link between emotion and memory, and they can also leverage another
feature of brain response that has an evolutionary basis. Memory basically exists for us to make sense of the
world, and we do this by responding to events as they unfold. So a strong narrative is very compelling for the
brain, and when we spot the beginnings of a narrative, we tend to engage with it and encode key pieces of
information as it unfolds. Intrigue, implied questions and tension can have a similar effect; setting up a puzzle for
the brain to solve and, in this situation, brain response tends to remain high throughout a narrative in order find
its resolution.

But this in itself can present a challenge. As our brains follow unfolding events, they store away key
“snapshots” of information from which they subsequently reconstruct the narrative. But the brain needs to have
demarcation points that signal the end of one story and the beginning of another – we call these event
boundaries. When the brain perceives a series of events come to an end, it takes the preceding series of
snapshots and there is a processing pause as it bundles them together and files them away – we call this
‘conceptual closure’. In itself this is a positive signal that our brains have engaged with a narrative but, because
the bundling effect involves a processing pause, the brain is relatively unreceptive to new information whilst this
is going on. So an advert that weaves a great story and engages an audience may well trigger conceptual
closure at the resolution of the narrative, and if this is the only point where branding or key messaging appears,
it may well fall foul of the processing pause. This runs the risk of the branding moment being missed by the brain
and the potential payoff from delivering a great narrative will never be realised.

In the below example, we can see two instances of the same advertisement. In the first edit, the two characters
leave the scene, which our research showed as a moment of conceptual closure – audiences took the punchline
and thought the ad was over, so they didn’t encode the brand logo which soon followed:

Suggesting an alternative cut which kept the characters in frame, mitigated the effects of conceptual closure by
keeping the brain waiting for the end point – which was now represented by the brand itself. The result was a
campaign which surpassed brand metrics for recognition, spontaneous brand awareness and doubled brand
linkage:
Another way of avoiding the pitfalls of conceptual closure is to ensure that branding doesn’t only appear at the
conclusion of an ad, but instead is woven throughout the narrative. This doesn’t mean that ads have to have
continual, overt branding on screen, but if branding cues can be delivered by, for example, a colour, visual style
or audio cue, advertisers don’t risk placing all their branding hopes on the final moment, and can generally
deliver more effective advertising as a result.

To conclude, it's worth reiterating what many creatives understand intuitively: that there is no single template for
a great ad, but there are clear benefits where branding can be woven in a natural way throughout an emotional,
engaging narrative, and an applied understanding of some fundamental subconscious responses will maximise
the chances of delivering a more effective outcome.

Implications
Neuroscience has some clear advantages when it’s used in the planning and creative process. In particular, it
can help marketers and advertisers to:

Understand the ways in which a brand lives in the brain – and how marketing can either help a brand grow
its associations among an audience, or to activate its brand equity at the optimal moment.
Use memory encoding as a crucial metric for determining advertising effectiveness. If great creative is to be
truly effective advertising rather than just entertainment it’s essential that key brand messages are strongly
encoded into memory.
Understand brain response on a second-by-second basis; important not just in optimising creative
executions but also in mitigating the potential effects of conceptual closure, which can lead to poor brand
linkage and, ultimately, ineffective messaging.
 Take account of the impact of neurostates, which help explain the relationship between media
environments and the content they deliver. In TV, for example aligning content with context can boost levels
of memory encoding by around 25%.

Further reading
WARC Best Practice: What we know about neuromarketing

WARC Topics: Neuroscience

Understand ad context through neuroscience

Three neuro lessons to assist creative design

Face presence and gaze direction in print advertisements: How they influence consumer responses –
an eye-tracking study

About the author

Heather Andrew

Heather Andrew is UK CEO of Neuro-Insight.

Heather has over 30 years’ experience in the areas of marketing, market research and media strategy. Prior to
joining Neuro-Insight, Heather had roles as marketing director for part of Rowntree Macintosh (now Nestlé) and
for a satellite television station. Moving into consultancy, she worked as a marketing and strategy consultant
with PWC and Oxford Strategic Marketing where she specialised in media work, and in developing marketing
and communication best practice for blue chip multinationals. Heather has been working in neuro-marketing for
over ten years and is one of the founders of Neuro-Insight’s UK operation.

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