Why is it important to understand how advertising really works? Because that way we can make ads better and grow brands better.
In the Bill Harvey Consulting (BHC) ten-year MMM study of top automotive, CPG, and QSR advertisers in the US, sponsored by FOX, fewer than one in five brands grew market share since 2014. This strongly suggests the need to go beyond “generally accepted practices”, proving that it is time to crack the code on how advertising really works.
The generally accepted belief systems in the industry are based on the assumption that questionnaire-based measurements are good enough. However, these generally tap only the conscious verbal mind, which is only one function of the mind, and Jerry Zaltman’s 2003 classic How Customers Think established that this part of the mind contributes only 5% to the decision to choose your brand.
Almost all large brands today rely on questionnaire-based data to segment markets psychologically, establishing personas that relate to the different product features in the product category. Then they try to target these segments by media data demographic lookalike modelling using ID graphs which are accurate about half the time according to CIMM and Truthset.
Like the guy who dropped his car keys down the street but who is looking for them under the streetlight instead, the industry has tended to accept whatever tools are at hand that their competitors are using. Now that billions of devices have cameras that can see the audience, direction of gaze is the latest craze, and a myth that is almost universally accepted is that conscious attention must be achieved in order for an ad to work. However, as predicted by Zaltman, neuroscientists are clear in telling us that conscious attention is not a necessity for an ad to have influence, because so much of our behavior is driven by subconscious factors. Direction of gaze being on the screen bearing the ad does help ads work, but only slightly.
What then is most important in terms of getting the most brand growth from advertising?
The ad must resonate with the deep motivations of the audience in order to cause brand growth.
What are the deep motivations? They are what drives the person to do what they do, to be who they are. The individual rarely has a clear picture of his or her own deep motivations. They may be conscious of the product features that matter to them, and advertising has focused on product features because they are “mentally available” to marketers, even though everyone now knows that behavioral economics has proved that consumers do not depend upon rational reasoning to make brand choices, as Jerry Zaltman tried to teach us more than two decades ago. Jerry also patented the ZMET method of tapping the subconscious, similar to the thematic apperception test (TAT), using drawings to determine the metaphors in the mind relating to brand choice in the product category, or to any other decision-making behavior.
A more scalable method was developed over a 30-year period of studying the problem and attacking it with neuroscience, AI, ML (machine learning), and big data. It centers on passively measuring an individual’s content consumption in order to see what motivates them behaviorally. It also uses experiments to test whether specific stimuli affect changes in behavior. The system, which I developed starting in the 20th Century, is now productized by a company I co-founded, RMT, and its partners, including Wharton Neuroscience, Samba/Semasio, Vividata, et al.
FOX is sponsoring a laboratory study with BHC and Wharton Neuroscience, which has been producing results presented so far at two ARF annual conferences, and a new paper has been accepted to be presented at ARF’s AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2025 in March. One recent finding is shown below. Wharton has established that a specific EEG metric called “synchrony” is the EEG metric that is most highly predictive of an ad’s sales effect. The chart below establishes that direction of gaze and even the more granular “fixations” eye camera metric is only slightly predictive of synchrony, whereas the RMT motivation resonance method is the most predictive metric ever found so far for synchrony.
Readers familiar with the work of neuroscientists Karl Friston and/or Lisa Feldman Barrett will recognize the prediction engine in the brain-mind system. Some of us have fallen in love with these theories. In my case it was largely because I had detected and reported the prediction-making behavior in myself through disciplined introspection, in my 1976 book Mind Magic.1 In a recent Zoom salon, VML Group Director – Marketing Effectiveness and Intelligence Jerry Nevins briefly introduced a gathering of RMT executives and Wharton neuroscientists to Active Inference (what Karl Friston calls his theory of the Prediction Engine, which I consider to be a “bio-AI” – the neuroscientists were of course already familiar with it) Here is a 12-minute video from that Zoom for you to enjoy if such things attract you as they do me.
What practical advice do these neuroscience discoveries about advertising evoke? A brand marketer must put more effort into understanding the deep motivations of the prospect and the current customer. RMT science sharpened by machine learning identifies 15 deep motivational clusters, containing in aggregate a total of 265 feelings. Interestingly, Dr. Michael Platt of Wharton Neuroscience indicates that neuroscience has identified about the same number of Value Signals in the brain which are electrochemical phenomena which appear to fMRI scans during a subject’s choice behavior. Could there be a 1:1 match between these electrochemical markers and RMT’s semantic markers? That is Michael’s hypothesis which we will be testing.
In Canada, Vividata has adopted the RMT system and is regularly reporting the deep motivations of brand loyal users and occasional users as well as competitive brand users. Dr. Pat Pellegrini who helped validate the RMT system when he was President of Simmons in the US, now is CEO of Vividata (“the MRI/Simmons of Canada”) and RMT Advisor Josh Chasin co-presented RMT Vividata findings with the cooperation of Initiative Media and Horizon Media at the recent ASI annual conference in Venice, Italy. In the US and Canada, RMT partner Samba/Semasio has advanced audience IDs reflecting RMT deep motivations for 316 million people, and also has deep motivations for advertiser-used websites and pages as well as for apps. Thus there are tools at the ready for marketers to use to learn about deep motivations that they could prioritize in their creative briefs. Experiments we have reported here before indicate that using the RMT Semasio advanced audiences can nearly double the incremental sales effects of a programmatic CTV or display campaign.
As advertisers and their agencies become more savvy about resonating with target audiences by focusing on their deep motivations, we should expect to see an increase of the growth of brands which have not been showing growth for years.
Jerry Zaltman Comments
Bill, here are the “refinements” I promised re my naïve and grossly generous claim that only 5% of thought is conscious. That statement was a consensus thought among experts at the time. It isn’t correct. Partly because we have no way of estimating it.
I argue in Dare to Think Differentlythat a mind’s complexity is such that all conscious thought, i.e. those we are aware of, has its primary residence in an unconscious inventory. It dwells beneath awareness though obviously capable of reaching awareness. However, not everything in our unconscious inventory of thought, i.e. below awareness, can be conscious. Further, I argue there is just one mind or residence, not two, e.g. conscious vs. unconscious. Additionally, not everything in it can be measured or reliably estimated. Nowhere is this more correct than when it comes to a mind’s contents. Given the complexities of what gives rise to a mind – which is way, way more than a single organ (a brain) – it is safer to say that in a given moment, we are aware of an immeasurably tiny bit of what a mind contains that drives our actions.
We knew in 1976 that the mind is always making predictions
“When you are about to see something, your mind automatically searches your memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between you seeing something and your mind having already seen it). If your mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that you do not ever see the new object, but are merely dimly aware that there is a familiar type of object there. Dissonance is not triggered, and this allows your attention freedom to concentrate on remaining percepts for which your mind has not found a suitable match. As a result of this, you mostly do not perceive your environment, instead perceiving mostly what you expect to perceive, i.e., you usually see your mind’s prediction. Since most objects have more relevant detail than you have ever noticed, this process robs you of the opportunity to add detail to your image of most objects. In some cases, the mental projection that you see is significantly different from the reality you do not see.” –Mind Magic Chapter One. The brain/mind’s predictions is mentioned in many chapters.
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