commercials

So, as the ad industry continues to talk about how the consumer is in control, they also spend a great deal of time trying to figure how to take away that control from them. How's this for a quote:

They make it sound like it's a good news.

Center for Research Excellence released new findings from their massive and very expensive ($3.5M) ethnographic study of media consumption behavior. The researchers observed and recorded behaviors of 376 adults in four markets for the average period of 33 hours each or roughly two full waking days (or "three-quarters of a million minutes" altogether, as they prefer to put it.) 

(NOTE: I originally wrote this article in 2005 and wondering if any of this has changed in 5 years since I originally wrote it. The audience is getting smarter and tougher. We keep talking about transparency and the audience being in control. Well, if we keep telling them they're in control, they're eventually go to expect to me in control. Then what are we going to do?)

Everyone loves to rank Super Bowl ads, and one neuromarketing firm that did so is Sands Research (see Super Bowl 2010 Ad Winners. Sands uses a combination of EEG, eye-tracking, biometrics, and surveys to calculate a “neuro-engagement factor” for each ad. Does that mean these ads will sell more product? Not necessarily. But here are the top ads accompanied by their measured EEG activity – you can see how the changes in brain activity match up with the action in the commercial.

What makes an engaging television commercial? If you think visual and auditory appeal – action, sound, music, people, color, etc. – you would usually be correct. Ditto for high production values. An exotic location might help, too.

In what is becoming an annual event, Sands Research announced the “winning” commercials for Super Bowl 2010 as determined by their neuromarketing analysis. Volkswagen emerged as #1, well ahead of the competition by Sands’ metrics.

I wonder whether the company, with its spot hitting 800K+ views on YouTube, isn't going to make more money selling their $15 t-shirts than it does selling trailers. Watch the "making of" video, too.
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It’s hard to say exactly what the creators of this ersatz Coke commercial were aiming for, but it seems like something that Neuromarketing readers would find amusing:

by: Roger Dooley

When the brain decodes a puzzle, even a simple one, there’s a little reward. Marketers have sometimes used this to good effect - see Puzzles Boost Brand Recognition and Marketing to the Infovore. Watch this commercial from Schick for its Quattro TrimStyle for Women razor:

by: Roger Dooley

Wonder what your brain looks like while watching commercials? Or, more to the point, what the electrical activity in your brain looks like? The folks at Sands Research have helped Neuromarketing readers by making available videos from five of the most engaging (by their metrics) 2009 Super Bowl ads.