May
12
This is your brain on screens
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, digital ooh
Joe Mandese over at Mediapost has written a fascinating article on “Screens” in general and the effect they have on the human brain.
Much has been done in “neuroscience” with regards to marketing and its effect on the human brain to try and understand human emotional response to messaging. It’s used to make better ad creative and better media choices to enhance the impact of a campaign or advertiser spend. while the tools aren’t generally used in everyday creative work, there are enough studies that are teaching the marketing community how to make better decisions about what we say and where we say it at a higher level to guide our hands.
What I loved about the article is that it actually covers off on supporting a few key things about DOOH screens and content that are important for marketers to understand:
- Emotionally based creative on (DOOH) screens is actually more powerful in connecting with consumers (emotionally) than interactive screens although less “engaging” (I found this fascinating to learn)
- The type of content displayed on a screen is an important variable in connecting with consumers emotionally
- Empathy is a strong emotional motivator in connecting with screen content
- Proximity plays an important role in how we perceive content (this was cool too!)
Joe actually alluded to political content during the article and I had to smile because I have personal experience in this “emotional response”, using DOOH screens, that ties right back to this article:
About 18 months ago, we were involved in some contextual political advertising and DOOH factored in heavily to how they were targeting constituents and voters. One of the plethora of environments we used happened to be Universities….which tend to have more “left leaning” voters based on sheer age. That being said, one of the ads that ended being digitally distributed to the DOOH screens was a bit of a personal “attack ad” on the character of one of the candidates. The ad was DESIGNED to spur an emotional response. To our great delight, the student reaction to the ads on the screens was so strong that the university was overwhelmed with calls and emails about the campaign message on the screens and how the students felt it was inappropriate messaging. The party was forced to take down the ad.
Now that’s creating an emotional response using DOOH! This stuff really works if you use it properly.
When it comes to advertising, much of it is art and I loved this comment on how it affects consumers…although this obviously makes it even more difficult to measure the long term effect of campaigns! From the article:
In fact, it is because we are not aware of some of these sensory effects that they can have such a powerful effect on our brains.
Now if only we could figure out how to use DOOH to actually get people to feel the same way as a loved one getting “shocked” we’d be flying 
(read the article…you’ll get it)
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