A New View of the Advertising Process in the Mind

Long before marketers woke up from this delusion that people always make decisions rationally amp8211 the term amp8220behavioral economicsamp8221 and some explanatory text was all they needed to come to their senses amp8211 the Advertising Research Foundation ARF found the need and opportunity to create its own model of how advertising is processed in the mind The ARF Model was oriented to the kinds of measurements that could be taken so every step in its Model was oriented to specific measurements the industry knew how to takeErwin Ephron loved to tell the story about how Alfred Politz the first advertising research giant argued that although Perception was unquestionably a key stage it was not operationalizable at the time and argued unsuccessfully to take it out Erwin and I and others got to update the Model in 2003 and we changed Perception to Attention as we knew that eye tracking was already available mostly thanks to Lee Weinblatt This was sort of a nod to AlfredWe also added Advertising Response amp8211 interaction with advertising short of sales amp8211 since clickthrough a term I had coined along with clickstream in the early 90s amp8211 was now a big deal by 2003 We added a lot of things including the nonlinearity of the Model ie things did not always have to happen in the standard sequenceThe standard sequence in 2003 wasVehicle DistributionVehicle ExposureAd ExposureAttentionCommunicationPersuasionAdvertising ResponseSales ResponseJust prior to that I had published a model with more steps which Jim Spaeth who as President of ARF had asked me to form the committee to update the ARF Model prompted by my publication which was in the ARFamp8217s Journal of Advertising Research JAR but Jim was also on the committee and he felt that 8 was the perfect number of steps to have in the Model citing Buddhaamp8217s Noble Eightfold PathDaniel Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his model of System1 vs System2 is also credited with the popularization of behavioral economics in the work he began in the 1980s although the term goes back to the 1940sOnly a year after Kahneman won the Nobel Prize Harvard Neuroscientist Jerry Zaltman published a book How Consumers Think which rocked the marketing world with the revelation that 95 of consumer decision making is subconscious To most marketers the word amp8220subconsciousamp8221 means amp8220emotionalamp8221 and is the amp8220oppositeamp8221 of amp8220rationalamp8221 which is an oversimplified mishmash of category errors amp8220Orthodoxy firstamp8221 neuroscientists sneer at the term amp8220subconsciousamp8221 and prefer amp8220below the level of conscious awarenessamp8221Today neuroscience has come to see Kahnemanamp8217s amp8220two systemsamp8221 as being more of a continuum as opposed to two polar categories fast vs slow thinking being more of a phenomenon than two separate systems and typical mind usage being more of a combination of both the slow and fast thinking aspectsKarl Friston has captured the minds of neuroscientists with his theory of active inferencing in which a prediction engine exists within the brain which makes most of the decisions leading to actions behavior This echoes Zaltman by translating amp8220subconsciousamp8221 into amp8220inference engineamp8221 which sits better within the scientific culture as it has come to be I published Mind Magic in 1976 which describes a amp8220robotamp8221 part of oneself which makes predictions and rules most of our actions Iamp8217m happy that Friston has backed me up in thatBecause the vast majority of marketers have never seen the importance of clarifying their understandings of how the human mind works with regard to advertising it is their tendency to oversimplify lump together things they donamp8217t understand and try to reduce the number of things they need to think about This is what enabled Attention to become perceived as just about the only amp8220qualitativeamp8221 variable one needs to think aboutIt would have taken only a few seconds of talking with an intelligent fiveyearold to come to the realization that almost all of us have had the experience of paying attention to a specific ad and never even thinking for one second about buying the product advertisedThe ARF Model of courseamp160even without having to explain it in detail implies merely from the list of 8 levels above that after one gets Attention you still have to get Communication and Persuasion before you are going to achieve any kind of behavioral response If you read the ARF 2003 Model paper you will see that nonlinearity is mentioned as a possibility and nothing is absolutely ruled out so it is possible you can sell something with an ad even if you skipped some stage in the Model amp8211 itamp8217s just highly unlikelyPutting together the latest work of Friston and everyone else in the field here is a new Model which emergesamp160amp160Motivations are formed within us by our experiences by our biological instincts and by a prediction engine that seeks to reduce surprise For the moment let us identify the prediction engine as a part of what has heretofore been called the subconscious mind Let us allow for the prediction engine also being able to bring specific feelings thoughts impulses and ideas into the conscious mind The prediction engine is therefore analogous to a bioAI Unlike the conscious mind which flits from this to that and is not constantly aware of all previous experiences the bioAI specializes in keeping all of that data front and center instantly and constantly accessible It evolved for our survival protection It warns us when it detects the probability of danger based on reams of data we have in our experience bank but at the moment we donamp8217t consciously realize are relevantAs Friston and virtually every neuroscientist and psychologist point out motivations also known as desires goals need states drives drivers objectives etc are the things we want most out of life and everything we do hinges upon these amp8220targeted outcomesamp8221 These are our Rubicon our Philosopheramp8217s Stone our compass our summum bonum This is why I have depicted Motivations in a purple ellipse because they are the central ruling features of the entire process everything else is derived from them and exists to serve themMotivations drive our actions including whether we are drawn to a screen by something therefore motivations are in charge at every stage of the ad response Before conscious perception apperception occurs which is subconscious perception the inference engine sees the stimulus If the engine categorizes the stimulus as relevant to the motivations the conscious mind will be caused to notice the stimulus Motivations precede Attention motivations even precede Perception This was left out of the ARF Model What we see in the new Model proposed above is that Motivations have been brought into the picture and if the Inference Engine amp8220gateamp8221 opens the cascade of advertising responses can begin to occur If the ad succeeds it will hold the active conscious attention and carry it along to feel attraction liking positive emotion and these experiences will be input into memory If certain attributes of the brand that had not in the past been strongly associated with the individualamp8217s motivations but now those brand attributes are linked more solidly to those motivations Value Signals abbreviated by neuroscientists as VS will be detected in the brain Hundreds of different VS have been identified in the brain This is a manifestation of how the brain calculates during choice behavior This may include Persuasion the increase in the valuation of the brand But if the perceived cost including time and inconvenience costs exceeds the perceived benefit different Value Signals will still occur but the result will not be Persuasion and there will be no buying action takenIn the work Iamp8217ve been privileged to do with FOX and Wharton Neuroscience weamp8217ve investigated the degree to which RMT Resonance predicts buying signals in the brain EEG memory encoding approach and synchrony RMT Resonance is the quantified psychological similarity between an ad and a media context in terms of hundreds of motivational dimensions empirically determined to be the drivers of choice behavior RMTResearch Measurement Technologies is a company I cofounded with Bill McKenna and Skip Cornelius and its predecessor Next Century Media NCM was an early user of machine learning and AI The RMT model is not a Large Language Model LLM but is a semantic Deep Learning Model DLM We found that these RMT metrics were significantly predictive of these EEG buying signalsWhen Michael Platt Wharton Neuroscience Initiative Director one of the founders of Neuroeconomics and an inventor of homeuse EEG systems saw the RMT results he wroteamp8220Given the alignment so far it looks like these may prove to be dare I say universal predictors which resonates with the ability to predict outofsample sales at high levelsamp8221When added to the plot of other sales predictive metrics RMT falls right below the EEG measures the 048 Adjusted R2 ability to predict sales comes from the ARF Cognition Council study which used six years of IRI sales dataamp160amp160RMT has decided to change the name amp8220DriverTagsamp8221 the 265 most granular motivational variables to amp8220Value Signalsamp8221 because it appears that these 265 meanings could well correspond to the hundreds of different valuation signals in the brain found by neuroscientists using fMRIPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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A New View of the Advertising Process in the Mind

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Bill Harvey

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