Sands Research, a neuromarketing firm, has announced it’s 4th annual neuro ranking of Super Bowl ads. This year the hands down winner was the Volkswagon Darth Vader commercial.
Is That Really News? (Hint: yes, and you’ll want to keep scrolling.)
After all, YouTube views for the VW commercial will probably have hit the 30 million mark by the time you read this. In case you’ve been living under a rock, here it is.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0
Compare that to the roughly 7 million views of my personal favorite from Chrysler.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc
And then compare it to the Neuro Ranking chart from Sands Research (click for larger image):
Again, Big Deal, Right?
Wrong. These rankings may not seem surprising given the virility of the top videos.
What you may not know about this ranking is that the measurement factors had nothing to do with viewing behavior (how many times viewed), and in fact seems to have accurately predicted the relative viral success by measuring brain activity and eye-tracking. Here’s the VW Darth Vader commercial again, only this time you can see real-time brain activity and visual “hot-spots” overlaid on the video that show where the person was focused. Check it out (clicking the image below will open a new window, be sure to come back to finish the story.)
This data was collected before the rest of the world could vote on each commercial’s success through viral sharing, etc. By tracking eye focus while simultaneously measuring brain activity through EEG, Sands Research data did a reasonable job of predicting which commercials would have the most impact.
“As you will see in the Volkswagen ad, the positive and negative emotional response flows with the commercial and ends on an extremely positive point,” said Dr. Sands. “By creating an engaging and emotional storyline with strong positive response, viewers were extensively engaged and strongly recalled the spot and more importantly, specifically recalled the brand associated with the commercial. Too often that correlation is lost and key branding moments are missed.”
You’ll notice how clever Volkswagon was in putting the logo right at eye level as we get sucked into the emotional finale of the story.
For more, read the full press release here, or visit the Sands Research Superbowl XLV page here (be sure to click the video image to see more brain activity goodness).
Thanks Jennifer
Cool stuff!
Eddie, we don’t often get to see what the brain activity looks like from these neuromarketing studies, so I love that Sands Research releases these for each Superbowl.
Thanks, Jennifer. Great stuff. I have re-posted on LinkedIn groups to which I belong – Neuromarketing and the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development.
Thank you Nadine, much appreciated. 🙂 I’m a member of the Neuromarketing LinkedIn group too, but I’ll confess that I don’t often visit it. Though I appreciate some of the in-depth threads there.
That’s interesting! I noticed the same thing you pointed out when I watched the video…how they put the logo at eye-level. Clever!
Most of the rest of the time, the attention seemed to be focused on the faces though. Do you think that’s an easy way to get attention?
Naomi,
According to various studies, books, marketing tactics, conversion studies etc I’ve read, faces do seem to draw attention. It’s not entirely new news of course.
I also read somewhere, and I’ll have to see if I can dig it up, that many commercials fail to place the logo or product at the end, leading to poor brand/product retention even if the ad is good. So VW won on multiple levels, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they used neuromarketing testing to fine-tune this ad before it went live.
Thanks Jennifer for the comments. It was another fun (but busy) time running all 69 Super Bowl commercials. To answer some the questions presented above:
1. Yes, it is well known and established in cognitive neuroscience that we look at faces (eyes than noses) first. Human behavior related to friend or foe / fight or flight reactions. Often we are advising creatives not to cut a scene so short because viewers have that lag time before they go to view other items in the scene after looking at faces (i.e. car dashboard scenes are always cut too tight).
2. Detusch LA’s team are well versed in the neurosciences. We sat down with them last year after their Punch Dub commercial came in first place in our ranking and were not surprised that their SVP of Account Planning was very knowledgeable in the field. (Matter of fact probably one of the most attuned that we have run across in all the ad agencies). Deutsch LA is not a Sands Research client nor do I believe they are working with any outside neuromarketing firm.
We have posted movies for the lowest ranking ads also and I think you will see easily see why they scored poorly.
If any of your readers are interested, we will conduct a Super Bowl Study briefing webinar on March 3rd at 2 pm EST. To join just send a request for log-in to info@sandsresearch.com
Best
Ron Wright
President / CEO
Sands Research Inc.
Ron, thanks for those insights. Very interesting information about Deutsch LA’s neuroscience knowledge. I’m curious what that looks like for them. Is it that they employ a neuroscientist on their team who advises? Are they running in-house EEG and eyetracking scans? If you know more that you can share, I would love to hear.
The information about lag time between looking at faces and other items (say, the product or logo) I’m sure is invaluable to your clients. It also points out the subtleties about these neuro facts that are not intuitively available, but only get revealed through various testing.
Jennifer –
I was not in on the meeting but as I understand, their SVP has a background in cognitive neuroscience and was actually referencing major scientific papers in the field. So that unique combination of advertising and cog neuro knowledge was in house. No they are not running any neuro studies at this time.
Exactly about your other comment and here is another one to remember in the creative process. Humans tend to turn off / tune out if a scene or commercial is over complicated. One of the worst spots we ever tested was for a certain telecom company and the spot was nothing more than a divided attention task. The speaker was in the forefront and the screen behind him rotated engaging pictures. The viewer did not know which one to focus on and so they just tuned out. (Ever notice how hard it is to read the scrolling news below ESPN or the news channel and still pay attention to the speaker above). We have one focus / attention channel for engaging (and why we look at each other when speaking but attention drops when distracted by noise, movement, etc. off to the periphery – especially men (ha ha!).
Well off the soapbox. We are learning a tremendous amount about how viewers respond to commercials (on TV or the web) and now lots of activity in measuring the consumer’s response in the retail (or any) environment.
Best
Ron