Neuroscience Proves That Premium Long-form Video Drives Outcomes

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.)

It is a well-known fact that biometric and neuro measures require far smaller samples to attain statistical significance than any other metrics used in marketing. In this study the split-half reliability analyses done by Wharton show that the same EEG results would have been obtained with only 10 subjects in each of the 10 cells instead of the 54 subjects per cell used in the study.

At the conclusion of the presentation, the next phase in this initiative was announced, in which all other buy and sell side companies are invited to share sponsorship and steering. In Phase 2, which is a pilot study, the EEG and resonance measurements will be taken out of the lab into the home, shifting from forced exposure to natural exposure over a six-month period, passively measuring ad exposures in the home, and matching these to purchases made by the home compared against the household’s historical record.

One of the most exciting features of this study is the ability to see the impression-to-impression changes in the four EEG measures associated with each of your ad impressions. A quantum leap from seeing campaign-to-campaign changes, or week-to-week changes, for the first time you will be able to see impression-to-impression changes at the neuro level.

Both the Media Rating Council and the ARF offered to be advisors to the study, and we readily agreed. Lou Paskalis also agreed to join the project as an advisor and to bring the project to the attention of the smartest people in the industry.

Our plan for organizing Phase 2 is to start with a virtual meeting in Q2 with all interested parties. By June we aim to know which suppliers we will be using, and the sponsors and advisors will have a large say in this. Therefore by June, we will know the total costs to run Phase 2 for 6 months (e.g. September 2025-February 2026) and we can calculate the cost per sponsor, which we aim to be as modest as possible. The value shall be priceless.

Reports Available in Phase 2

We will be able to report on all client ads and also to roll up findings to the brand and category level and even to the all-ads level. We will be able to examine the relationships among:

• EEG ATTENTION
• EEG MEMORY
• EEG APPROACH/AVOIDANCE
• EEG SYNCHRONY
• CHANGE IN PURCHASE BEHAVIOR
• MOTIVATIONAL CONTENT OF ADS
• MOTIVATIONAL CONTENT OF CONTEXTS
• MOTIVATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS (BASED ON CONTENT CONSUMED)
• RESONANCE BETWEEN AD-CONTEXT MOTIVATIONS
• RESONANCE BETWEEN AD-PERSON MOTIVATIONS

One example of a report format:

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