Attraction is More Important Than Attention or Emotion

This body of work plus relevant studies in psychology and neuroscience have already established that attention is not the only “quality” determinant of outcome effects such as incremental sales increases, increases in positive attitudes toward specific brands, and, for tune-in advertisers, increases in viewing of a program series.

The most frequently mentioned other “quality” dimension of an ad impression critical to achieving such results is emotion. And specifically positive emotion. Because negative emotion could have exactly the opposite outcome effects.

However, the word “emotion” in this context is an incomplete descriptor. Even the notion of “positive emotion” is incomplete. Why is this so?

Because an ad may cause you to feel positive emotion yet it might have no impact on how you feel about the advertised brand, and therefore no effect on your buying behavior related to that brand. Funny ads may put you in a great mood - and you might even be grateful to a brand for putting them on the air - and yet this might not change your buying behavior.

So the simplistic “attention plus emotion” mantra is not explicit enough to induce sufficient understanding to cause practitioners to create and properly distribute ads that get the real job done. Hence this article which is aimed at fully closing the gap.

An ad works - especially in terms of bringing in customers that are new to the brand - when the specific positive emotion that is felt during the viewing of the ad is attraction. Not all positive emotions move the needle on attraction, although most cases of attraction do involve some degree of positive emotion. Nevertheless, attraction is core to the success of an ad, especially for brand growth (new to brand acquisition), and positive emotion is more of a secondary effect.

The degree of emotion and the degree of attraction need not hit a certain high level before having behavioral impact, especially in low involvement product categories. For example, for a new brand of chewing gum, among heavy users of the category the degree of attraction to a new brand might be extremely slight but enough to impel trial, when activated by seeing the new brand on the checkout shelf. Among high involvement product/service categories the degree of attraction might need to be greater.

How do we measure attraction then? The famed neuroscientist Dr. Richy Davidson, with whom I’ve had the honor of working, discovered that the ratio of activity in the right vs. left frontal cortex indicates attraction-repulsion - attraction when the activity is stronger in the left frontal - and repulsion when it is stronger in the right frontal. I had the exciting experience of working with Richy and Dan Goleman at the time this idea was just occurring to Richy.

EEG (also SST, the invention of Dr. Richard Silberstein, which is a more precise and stable method than EEG) is the main tool for measuring attraction today. Back in the early days, Richy, Dan and I used a battery including EEG, EMG (electromyograph measuring the frontalis and tensor muscles) which is able to discern invisibly small smiles or frowns that facial coding cannot see, EKG, and a second-by-second voluntary response analogous to today’s dial or slider for subjects to self-report their subjective degree of positivity-negativity toward the stimulus experience.

The seat of the emotions in the brain is the limbic system, which is at the core of the brain, over-wrapped by the cortex. Yet attraction-repulsion can be measured at the frontal cortex by Richy’s ratio. And that is the way neuroscientists are doing it today. Which is a very good thing because it is a pivotal measure for advertising, more to the point than emotion per se.

In retrospect it may seem obvious that we need to be attracted to something before we go out and buy it. So much in life is obvious once you know it, but not before.

So if we want to have a simplistic mantra, let it be “attention and attraction” rather than “attention and emotion”.

What about relevancy? People have conscious or non-conscious attractions called wants, desires, need states, motivations, goals, predispositions. These leanings are what determine which stimuli grab our attention. Where the individual audience member is consciously aware of what has happened, he or she instantly understands why this stimulus has caught their attention. In the bulk of cases, however, the attention we pay to things is fleeting and unimportant to us and so we don’t bother thinking about why our eyes jerked to the TV screen just then.

“My” company RMT (Research Measurement Technologies) uses the word “resonance” - a form of relevancy - to label two types of situations which are pragmatic to the aim of increasing advertising effectiveness:

1. The ad resonates with the person seeing/hearing it
2. The ad resonates with the context it is in

Five different independent studies (Nielsen NCS, Neustar, 605, Simmons, and ARF Cognition Council) have established that sales and branding effects both increase (typically 30% or more) when either or both of these two types of resonance is achieved. This means that resonance must have increased either attention or attraction or both.

How can ads be made more likely to cause attraction to the brand?

1. Make sure the brand is clearly identified throughout the ad, using audio and video if both available. The most vestigial of all advertising practices is surprising the audience with the identity of the brand only at the end of the ad. Dr. Richard Silberstein further warned against branding coming right after closure has been achieved on the storyline of the ad, because of cognitive latency (the brain’s way of recharging) always following on the heels of closure.
2. The message of the ad needs to focus on conveying how buying and using the brand will pay off motivations the audience member already has. Do they want status/prestige? Love? A better world? Everyone (the younger generations especially) would like the world to be a better place, so an ad which shows how the brand is actually doing something sensible in that direction should create attraction. Or, the brand may actually have a benefit that prospects care about because of their desire to themselves be more attractive, respected, successful, fit, healthy, safe, etc. and of course that is exactly what the ad should dramatize in order to create attraction.
3. Leverage resonance to addressably target people whose motivations align with your ad, and to place the ad in contexts that resonate with the ad’s motivational payload.
4. Leverage attention methods such as Amplified Intelligence to maximize the attention your ad gets.
5. Utilize area probability samples plus big data with deterministic purchaser targeting in order to minimize sub-optimization due to biases in base data. Don’t be fooled by sex/age oversimplification, it has very weak targeting value except for prescription drugs and a small number of other exceptions.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.