At the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2025 conference in New York, March 25-26, 2025, FOX SVP Kym Frank led off the presentation of the final results of the year-long FOX WHARTON BHC NEURO STUDY 2024. She reminded us that advertising interrupts the viewer experience. If the advertising creative is incongruous with the programming content, this can cause a dissonant experience for the viewer. If, on the other hand, the ad content reflects the mood of the program, what results is resonance, which findings from the study proved increase the sales effect of advertising, using a graph from the NCS study of RMT ad-context resonance.
This set the mood for the rest of the presentation, which uncovers the fact that not all impressions are created equal. In fact, the difference in the advertising value of impressions is enormous, and this goes far beyond attention or simple emotion.
Dr. Michael Platt, Executive Director of Wharton Neuroscience then presented the main findings of the year-long neuro study, which processed a total of 540 people through the lab, possibly the largest such neuro study ever done. The findings are too voluminous to include all of them here, but below we will provide a link through which you can see all of the major findings.
Eight ads were studied across eight major verticals using forced exposure and ten contextual conditions: Seven types of TV/streaming (TV set), YouTube and Facebook (smartphone), and ads with no context. Most TV ads are viewed on TV sets and most YouTube and Facebook video ads are viewed on smartphones.
Four EEG measures were taken: attention, memory encoding, approach-avoidance, and synchrony, the latter having been established by Wharton Neuroscience and top advertisers as the most predictive of the sales effects of advertising (r=0.91). (Carl Marci had reached the same conclusion.)
In addition to EEG measures, the study also measured eye tracking with and without eye fixations, ad recall, persuasion (post only), and RMT Motivational Resonance between each ad and each context.
Major Findings:
Television generated sustained high positive effects on all EEG metrics whereas digital synchrony and approach-avoidance effects were largely negative and sustained for less than a second for Facebook and for 5 seconds for YouTube (during which time the eye tracking showed fixations mostly on the skip button and other content besides the ad). This is in stark contrast to the fact that in the last ten years global ad spend has shifted from 23% digital to 80% digital (including small advertisers). In the US among national major CPG, Auto, QSR advertisers the shift was from 46% digital in 2017 to 69% digital in 2023.
There was no direct link to purchase data for the lab subjects studied, and so synchrony was used as a sales proxy to estimate how well each of the other metrics might predict sales effects. This showed that RMT ad-context motivational resonance was the best predictor of synchrony and therefore presumably the best predictor after synchrony of sales effects. (Other than supplying data RMT was not a part of this phase of the study. RMT was invited to join as a partner in future phases as a result of this finding.)
Phase 3
It is our hope that by Phase 3, we are able to sign up sponsors/subscribers on an annual basis like other always-on syndicated services, and that Phase 3 becomes a new supplier providing valuable data to everyone for optimizing branding and sales effects of advertising. The sample size and data suppliers will in large part be determined by the clients. The aim will be coverage of all TV and digital ad exposures. The target will be coverage of 80% of the average panelist’s TV/digital consumption.
Please click here to receive the major findings of Phase 1 and a more detailed description of the multi-phase plan.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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