9 ms·

Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

142 points by philh 12y ago

r0s 12y ago
Lots of theory here but surely there's some solid science that can address these ideas?
- _Adam 12y ago
  It's quite simple to suggest an experiment to prove the article's point (which I find very convincing). Look at an ad for a product you own (e.g. iPhone) that you perceive as conveying some form of emotion. Now, go use that product. Do you feel the emotion portrayed in the ad? To make this more scientific, expand the above test to a few hundred people. Query their emotional state with a survey (or possibly by facial expressions, if that's considered an accurate means of evaluating emotional response). Do this for a number of products, ensuring that boring products (e.g. household cleaning products) are included to rule out emotion generated from the intrinsic properties of the product. Then check for the existence/non-existence of a correlation between the emotion felt and the emotion portrayed.
  - roryokane 12y ago
    That experiment would not accurately test the emotional inception theory. The theory states that given ads associating a product with a positive emotion, people will eventually feel that emotion when they see the product in the store, and be compelled to buy it. Your experiment tests whether people feel that emotion when they use the advertised product after having bought it. You might assume that these answers would match, but that is a dangerous and unnecessary assumption. I have an idea for a more accurate experiment. Survey a number of people about what brands of some product they buy, if any. The product should be something that does not currently have many ads for it (like bedsheets), so that cultural imprinting is not a factor. Then send them a weekly email newsletter on some random topic. Each newsletter would also contains ads for a certain brand of that product. The people would be split into two groups. For half of them, the ad for the product tries to associate the brand with a positive image. For the other half, the ad tries to associate the brand with a neutral image, while otherwise keeping the text the same. This splitting into groups ensures that “honest signaling” is not a confounding factor. To ensure that the participant opens the newsletter and sees the ads, participants would be asked to search each newsletter for a piece of information and reply to the email with that information. After three months of the newsletters, participants would be surveyed again about what brands of the product they buy, if any. If emotional imprinting theory is accurate, the participants who were shown the positive images should have increased their purchasing of that brand of product more than the neutral-image participants increased their purchasing.
- _greim_ 12y ago
  The article itself sort of suggests a way. Gather data on how much advertisers are spending on television ads. See if there's a super-linear correlation between non-fragmented audience size and ad dollars spent.
_Adam 12y ago
A comment to the author of the article: I don't agree with your point about non-immunity. Cultural imprinting works because it leverages the desire that humans have to portray a certain image or belong to a certain group. As rational humans, we can eliminate the pull of such ads by building our own understanding about the group the ad is appealing to, and how that ad appeals to the group. Equipped with this understanding, we can find far more effective ways than drinking Corona to portray the image of being chill and relaxed. Alternatively, we can reconsider our willingness to be included in that group. Once we realize the only thing binding Corona drinkers together is their collective vision of some beach, we might realize that there's more interesting people to drink with.
- analog31 12y ago
  From the article: >>>> The problem is that there's no escape, no immunity, from this kind of ad. Once we see it — and know that all our peers have seen it too — it's in our rational self-interest to buy the advertised product. No it's not. That's where non-immunity falls down. For one thing, peer pressure is still only one factor in choosing a product, and we can still use our rational brains to weigh it against other factors. It only adds to the information at our disposal, but doesn't necessarily outweigh other information. We might decide that tasty beer is more important than personal image, or that the social impact of our beer choice is either negligible or not worth paying extra for.
comex 12y ago
Maybe I'm just less aware of what other people do than others, but I find this fundamentally unconvincing (the argument that this explains most of what's usually considered emotional inception, not the existence of the phenomenon in some cases). > Beer, soft drinks, gum, every kind of food (think backyard barbecues). Restaurants, coffee shops, airlines. Cars, computers, clothing. Music, movies, and TV shows (think about the watercooler at work). Even household products send cultural signals, insofar as they'll be noticed when you invite friends over to your home. Any product enjoyed or discussed in the presence of your peers is ripe for cultural imprinting. Your choice of coffee shop or fast food communicates something to your peers if you're seen there, which, as far as I know, is often fairly uncommon, depending on your situation. It's nice to be culturally aware, but that doesn't constrain your consumption of music, movies, and TV too much (especially music) unless you watch very little. Nobody notices what brand of sneakers you're wearing... at least, I rarely even look down that far, and I can't believe other people are that different. Household products? Maybe once in a year. Nor do I find all of the anecdotes convincing. Bed sheets - sheets themselves may not be the hottest product category, but I've seen many mattress and mattress store commercials. Tempur-pedic, Sleepy's (I have heard that jingle so many times I doubt I will ever forget it), etc. Gas stations - don't advertise because usually you don't have multiple stations right next to each other. Since the service is a commodity, everyone goes to the closest station. Why not two-faced - because it's easier to remember something if it's clear, well-defined, and repeated often, and that includes unconscious associations. No need to bring in cultural factors.
- Retric 12y ago
  Gas stations do advertise. Fill in the blank '___ with Techron'. You also see a list of gas stations at an interstate exit sign. http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/05/1869947/ads-at-interstate-exits-mean-revenue.html http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/05/1869947/ads-at-interstate... (third immage bottom right.) Anyway, there are lot's of forms of advertizing. From informative "talk to your doctor about ED" to simply memorable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcbasIb8lQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcbasIb8lQ However, the cultural inception idea is not about some sort of Pavlovian response. You don't actually get to taste what's for sale in a supermarket, so it's an abstract choice. And with little to no information to work off of you make a split second decision after split second decision which is draining. In that situation simple familiarity is worth a lot. Similarly, your not actually going to test drive every car in your price range on the market. That said, signaling is a big part of advertising. If nobody knows you just spent 20k on a watch it's harder to justify the purchase.
davemel37 12y ago
This article Is based on an incorrect assumption of the utility and function of branding ads. they don't change perception...they don't make a new impression...they support a pre existing perception and reinforce it. Brand perceptions and this cultural imprinting he refers to are driven by word of mouth, media coverage, and third party validation... Once we have a perception- ads reminds us of it. Yes, ego and peer pressure are strong emotional drivers of purchase behavior but so are dozens of other emotions we satisfy with various purchases.
dgreensp 12y ago
I agree that the primary mechanism of ads is to affect the "landscape of cultural meanings" so that a product is associated with a broader meaning or image, but I don't think this is so different from the Mad Men philosophy, or that making purchasing decisions to feed your external image is so much more rational, and more relevant, than feeding your self-image. Maybe you choose your household cleaners just to impress your guests. You wear Axe Body Spray because of what it communicates about you ("Hey girl, I'm wearing Axe Body Spray right now"). I don't need bystanders while I drink Corona in order to feel like I'm the kind of guy who'd rather be chilling on a beach far from the daily grind. I'm making a statement to myself about the kind of person I am, one who endorses those values or that fantasy. There's got to be a way to take the bystander out of the equation. If we want to maintain the idea that we are all rational thinkers -- only "culture" is irrational, or other people's subconsciouses! -- how about: the advertiser is selling us a bit of meaning, thereby increasing the value of the product. Meaning is hard to obtain, and making purchasing decisions based on advertisements is one way for rational individuals to obtain this scarce resource.
jsonne 12y ago
Imho a good ad, and more broadly a good brand, both has a cultural imprint piece and a "emotional inception" piece. Think of Chick Fil A. They've taken a strong stand on same sex marriage. They've made a cultural imprint on you in that you either support or don't support that lifestyle. So far so good right? However, you also feel something about that. You're either happy or upset about their brand. So not only are you associating that brand with your lifestyle, you're also having a feeling about that brand.
tbrock 12y ago
I don't buy it. This advertisement, especially the unreleased version narated by Steve Jobs, gives me goosebumps every time I watch it: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu6zeLSWq8 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu6zeLSWq8 I had such a strong emotional response to it that I remember watching it for the first time vividly from when I was little.
tedks 12y ago
Oh man. That's a doozy. Well, uh. >We may not conform to a model of perfect economic behavior, but neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a billboard. We aren't that easily manipulated. Yeah. Yeah we are. It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it and it's a really cool field. Like the author, I'm not going to cite specific sources in this comment, but anything in it is probably covered in Cialdini's Influence (a fantastic starting point for persuasion psychology) or Gass & Seiter's Persuasion (which is not as easy to read as Influence but is a better textbook). First off, advertisements definitely do work via simple association. Humans use liking as a heuristic for virtually all decisions (we decide in favor of things we like), so increasing liking increases purchases fairly reliably. A warmth appeal like a Coke ad with smiling faces will reliably create an association between Coke and positive emotions just because that's how humans are wired. If you activate two concepts together, you link them. This is just how humans work and is the basis of most of cognitive psychology. Many, many things make sense once you start to see things in terms of co-activation and priming. The author calls this emotional inception, but that's sort of... not a real term, so I'll just call it association, which is the actual term. You do associate Coke with positivity after seeing it often enough. That's the basis on which observational learning works, and observational learning is pretty obviously a thing. If you don't believe me on that you can pretty simply replicate some Banderas experiments with a 6 year old if you happen to have one lying around. The current cognitive model of persuasion closest to the truth (IMHO) is Kruglanski's Unimodel. But it's too complicated to explain here and the older models will work, so I'll use an older model here for the purposes of explanation. Older persuasion models posited that there were two routes to compliance: the central route, through the target's careful, rational consideration of options, and the peripheral route, through cognitively quick decisions made mostly on factors that are heuristic. This is a natural way of viewing things in a System 1/System 2 algorithms vs. heuristics world (for more on this see Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow). Humans almost never spend enough time on a decision for it to be considered rational in any way. Humans are wired with a fairly small amount of heuristics and we use those for literally everything. Liking, availability, and conformity are all we can muster in most cases. The author dislikes this, but doesn't offer any reason why it isn't true, and doesn't present any science as to why it isn't true, so... sorry man, but you might just have to accept humans aren't rational. I know it might be difficult to be a libertarian after that, but I'm sure you'll deal. Because of this, virtually all advertising is targeted at the peripheral route. All of the mechanisms the author discusses are peripheral cues: Associational priming to create liking, mere exposure effects, appeals to authority (sorry, saying 4/5 doctors recommend X is not a rational cue to buy X), brand image, resource expenditure (as if people who buy more expensive engagement rings are less likely to cheat -- I'd bet money the opposite is true!), and finally, what the author calls cultural imprinting, but is actually something like a mix of self-image manipuulation. Because of the mechanisms used for observational and social learning, images that don't actually give us food can create these cognitive links that later do cause us to buy products. When you see the Corona add, you notice a few things. The first is probably the attractive person of the gender you're attracted to. The advertisers nicely put two of them there, so you could be anything but asexual and have something to salivate over. You notice the open space and clear skies, and the beach, something you probably have a positive association with already with lots of nice sensory cues. Very last, you'd notice the text, which you have to manually process, and you'd notice that it says "Find your beach", which implies that drinking Corona will make you feel similar to these things. The ad has communicated that Corona will make you attractive, calm, and relaxed, which are all nice things on their own. The ad also does, as the author points out, establish another association on the meta-level, between people who drink Corona and people who have these qualities. This isn't terribly different from any of the other aspects of the ad, though, and it's certainly not a different mechanism. Ultimately it all comes down to making associations. I really hope the author and other interested people get into the actual science behind persuasion. It's a really fun field and it's very rewarding.
jonahx 12y ago
The abundance of laundry detergent, mop, swiffer, and other home cleaning ads seems like a counterexample to the points about bed sheets and gas stations. Toilet paper ads are another counterexample.
mieses 12y ago
This argument is spot on but we resist it because we think we are above culture, too smart for it, that we can reduce everything to science, analysis, and engineering. The opposite is true. Culture is everything. Your brain does not receive ads in a kind of tabula rasa clean room environment. Thanks for articulating this!
r0h1n 12y ago
>> Q: Have you ever seen an ad for bed sheets? Can you even name a brand of bed sheet? If ads work by emotional inception, wouldn't you expect to have seen at least a few ads trying to incept you with the idea that Brand X bed sheets are going to brighten your day? [2] By the same theory we should rarely ever see ads for mattresses too, since their "consumption is purely obscure". And yet, I'm bombarded by ads for mattresses everywhere.
ncavet 12y ago
Complete nonsense. Do you really believe that comms majors are being tought cultural inception in undergrad? The Corona ad, like all ads, is a response ne to a brief that is designed to address a business objective. In this case get people to drink Corona not just in the Summer. Hence find your own beach even if you live in Minnesota in the Winter and would normally reach for a winter beer. We don't sit around at agencies with our clients discussing the best way to mind fuck the public. Ads are tested on awareness, purchase intent, brand association and message association. Creatives reach for the stars. Clients and strategists pull them back to earth. Depending on the people involved. Some ads are great. Some suck. Case closed. - Ad Agency Guy (BTW none of us watch Mad Men)
- estefan 12y ago
  How they're made doesn't explain why they work or not. But having said that if that ad was run in the winter it could be interpreted in a very different way to if it was a summer campaign.
salmonellaeater 12y ago
There's an excellent book called Rational Ritual[1][2][3] which develops this idea much more fully. The thesis is that common knowledge (I know something, and I know everyone else knows it too) is very powerful and rationally drives people's behavior. One of the arguments in the book revolves around the absurd pricing of advertising during big public events like the Super Bowl. If advertisers weren't concerned about the common knowledge aspect of their messages, they would air their ads when the cost per viewer is lowest. And you do see this with non-social goods, which tend to be advertised during off hours. But companies producing social goods like beer pay much more per viewer for prime-time and Super Bowl slots in order to get their product into the cultural zeitgeist. If you see something in a Super Bowl ad, you know most other people have seen it too. [1] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9998.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9998.html [2] PDF of the original 2001 manuscript: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Chwe1.pdf http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Chwe1.p... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Ritual-Culture-Coordination-Knowledge/dp/0691114714 http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Ritual-Culture-Coordination-K...
- chrismcb 12y ago
  I would imagine the cost per viewer for a Super Bowl commercial isn't that high. Super Bowl commercials are expensive because there are so many viewers. In addition to the extra press surrounding them.
  - salmonellaeater 12y ago
    Super Bowl ads cost about the same per viewer as prime-time TV slots ($35 per thousand in 2014). Both cost about four times as much per viewer as daytime TV. Primetime: http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4715 http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4715 Daytime: http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4710 http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4710
    - makomk 12y ago
      With daytime TV you can only reach consumers that are watching TV during the daytime though. That's a lot of potential customers that will never, ever see any of your ads.
pjbrunet 12y ago
"You could swap in a Budweiser or Heineken and no information would be lost." Corona is a lighter beer, which is what you want on a hot beach where you're sweating and thirsty. Yahoo Answers: Corona - 4.6% Heineken - 5.4% Budweiser - 5.0%
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dschiptsov 12y ago
All oversimplified models are naive nonsense, especially those which were developed to contradict another oversimplified models. It is the same flaw as to say 'clouds cannot be of this or that particular shape, they are always of this or that'. There are too many 'variables' in what we could call the [naive] psychology of a mind or so called Froidian psychology. Any undergraduate cognitivist would tell. It is not the naive this-OR-that 'logic' according which mental processes work. It is this-AND-that logic. BTW the author probably should study Wikipedia article about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is, of course, yet another oversimplified model.)
smsm42 12y ago
I've seen a lot of ads, for example, for household cleaning products (dishwashers, detergents, sponges, soaps, etc.) which are not social at all - they actually even more a-social than bedsheets, your house guests may happen to notice your bedsheets but would rarely know which soap you use to wash your dishes or windows. So while it sounds very persuasive for some products, one may easily poke holes in the concept applied universally.
- scribu 12y ago
  As the author mentioned at the beginning of the article, ads for household cleaning products work by making promises (if you use X toothpaste, your breath will smell fresher for 24 hours), instead of creating cultural signals (Beyonce drinks Pepsi).
  - jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
    Well there is an element of cultural signaling going on. Washing up liquid like 'Fairy' in the UK usually feature an attractive mother in a middle class white household dealing with the state of their children's (usually boys) clothes after they've come home from soccer practise or school or what have you. The ad isn't saying Beyonce endorses the product, but it is saying that yes! you too can be like this supermom and effortlessly and jovially clean your kid's clothes for school tomorrow, so you look like a neglectful parent thanks to Fairy. Trust Fairy. Live Fairy. Fairy is love. Fairy is life.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
"So if a theory (like emotional inception) says that something as flat and passive as an ad can have such a strong effect on our behavior, we should hold that theory to a pretty high burden of proof." When I was adolescent I went to a(my first) music concert, it was an incredible experience, I even met my first girlfriend there. I was surprised that it was Coca Cola everywhere. For me this was freedom(from my home environment), adventure, joy, friendship, and even sex. Way more than pixels on the screen. Today is not Coca Cola. I do B.A.S.E jumping, love going downhill with my bike and when I go to see or meet the Gods of the trail or Skydiving doing incredible things(them,not me) I see REDBULL EVERYWHERE in the events they participate. Pixels on the screen are probably not that good, but they affect millions at the same time. Lots of people watch porn, even when it is just "pixels on the screen". A significant part of the advertising industry do not use pixels at all, they use text, they are called "copywriters" and what they do is tell stories.
DanBC 12y ago
> It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images. "You're never alone with a Strand" seems like a reasonable counter. > Q: Have you ever seen an ad for bed sheets? Can you even name a brand of bed sheet? If ads work by emotional inception, wouldn't you expect to have seen at least a few ads trying to incept you with the idea that Brand X bed sheets are going to brighten your day? Yes, I do see ads for bed sheets and for bed sheet makers. The author is just looking in the wrong places.
joars 12y ago
I would love to read this article in a shorter, more concice format. From the paragraphs I read the author spends most of his time trying to describe the common (mis)conceptions held by a layman in advertising by giving numerous citations and examples, which is weird and repetitive when his argument is that we already know and hold the assumptions.
joars 12y ago
I would love to read this article in a shorter, more concice format. From the paragraphs I read the author spends most of his time trying to describe the common (mis)conceptions held by a layman in advertising by giving numerous citations and examples, which is weird and repetitive when his argument is that we already know and hold the assumptions.
joars 12y ago
I would love to read this article in a shorter, more concice format. From the paragraphs I read the author spends most of his time trying to describe the common (mis)conceptions held by a layman in advertising by giving numerous citations and examples, which is weird and repetitive when his argument is that we already know and hold the assumptions.
jgamman 12y ago
thinking fast and slow is the book for you. nobel prize winner gives the skinny... and yeah, there's actual experiments that show merely familiarity breeds positive responses. NB there's a bit of commentary going on at the moment about the reproducibility of the experiments in this field
hownottowrite 12y ago
The Ehrenberg Bass Institute has quantitative marketing/advertising/brand results going back to the 50s. If you're interested in the math, I recommend checking out How Brands Grow by EBI director, Byron Sharp. [1] http://www.marketingscience.info http://www.marketingscience.info [2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195573560 http://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195...
RangerScience 12y ago
I've heard of this idea before under the term "Lifestyle Advertising". You don't sell the product, you sell a "culture" that "exists", with your product being a means to signal "membership" in that "culture". Things to Google: - LessWrong "Applause Lights" - Burning Man Ten Principles (specifically, Decommodification, Radical Self-Expression, and Participation) PS - I really like the point about "you need to know that everyone else knows what this means..." - that's a good point!

142 points by philh 12y ago

r0s 12y ago

Lots of theory here but surely there's some solid science that can address these ideas?

_Adam 12y ago
It's quite simple to suggest an experiment to prove the article's point (which I find very convincing). Look at an ad for a product you own (e.g. iPhone) that you perceive as conveying some form of emotion. Now, go use that product. Do you feel the emotion portrayed in the ad? To make this more scientific, expand the above test to a few hundred people. Query their emotional state with a survey (or possibly by facial expressions, if that's considered an accurate means of evaluating emotional response). Do this for a number of products, ensuring that boring products (e.g. household cleaning products) are included to rule out emotion generated from the intrinsic properties of the product. Then check for the existence/non-existence of a correlation between the emotion felt and the emotion portrayed.
- roryokane 12y ago
  That experiment would not accurately test the emotional inception theory. The theory states that given ads associating a product with a positive emotion, people will eventually feel that emotion when they see the product in the store, and be compelled to buy it. Your experiment tests whether people feel that emotion when they use the advertised product after having bought it. You might assume that these answers would match, but that is a dangerous and unnecessary assumption. I have an idea for a more accurate experiment. Survey a number of people about what brands of some product they buy, if any. The product should be something that does not currently have many ads for it (like bedsheets), so that cultural imprinting is not a factor. Then send them a weekly email newsletter on some random topic. Each newsletter would also contains ads for a certain brand of that product. The people would be split into two groups. For half of them, the ad for the product tries to associate the brand with a positive image. For the other half, the ad tries to associate the brand with a neutral image, while otherwise keeping the text the same. This splitting into groups ensures that “honest signaling” is not a confounding factor. To ensure that the participant opens the newsletter and sees the ads, participants would be asked to search each newsletter for a piece of information and reply to the email with that information. After three months of the newsletters, participants would be surveyed again about what brands of the product they buy, if any. If emotional imprinting theory is accurate, the participants who were shown the positive images should have increased their purchasing of that brand of product more than the neutral-image participants increased their purchasing.
_greim_ 12y ago
The article itself sort of suggests a way. Gather data on how much advertisers are spending on television ads. See if there's a super-linear correlation between non-fragmented audience size and ad dollars spent.

_Adam 12y ago

A comment to the author of the article: I don't agree with your point about non-immunity. Cultural imprinting works because it leverages the desire that humans have to portray a certain image or belong to a certain group. As rational humans, we can eliminate the pull of such ads by building our own understanding about the group the ad is appealing to, and how that ad appeals to the group. Equipped with this understanding, we can find far more effective ways than drinking Corona to portray the image of being chill and relaxed. Alternatively, we can reconsider our willingness to be included in that group. Once we realize the only thing binding Corona drinkers together is their collective vision of some beach, we might realize that there's more interesting people to drink with.

analog31 12y ago
From the article: >>>> The problem is that there's no escape, no immunity, from this kind of ad. Once we see it — and know that all our peers have seen it too — it's in our rational self-interest to buy the advertised product. No it's not. That's where non-immunity falls down. For one thing, peer pressure is still only one factor in choosing a product, and we can still use our rational brains to weigh it against other factors. It only adds to the information at our disposal, but doesn't necessarily outweigh other information. We might decide that tasty beer is more important than personal image, or that the social impact of our beer choice is either negligible or not worth paying extra for.

comex 12y ago

Maybe I'm just less aware of what other people do than others, but I find this fundamentally unconvincing (the argument that this explains most of what's usually considered emotional inception, not the existence of the phenomenon in some cases). > Beer, soft drinks, gum, every kind of food (think backyard barbecues). Restaurants, coffee shops, airlines. Cars, computers, clothing. Music, movies, and TV shows (think about the watercooler at work). Even household products send cultural signals, insofar as they'll be noticed when you invite friends over to your home. Any product enjoyed or discussed in the presence of your peers is ripe for cultural imprinting. Your choice of coffee shop or fast food communicates something to your peers if you're seen there, which, as far as I know, is often fairly uncommon, depending on your situation. It's nice to be culturally aware, but that doesn't constrain your consumption of music, movies, and TV too much (especially music) unless you watch very little. Nobody notices what brand of sneakers you're wearing... at least, I rarely even look down that far, and I can't believe other people are that different. Household products? Maybe once in a year. Nor do I find all of the anecdotes convincing. Bed sheets - sheets themselves may not be the hottest product category, but I've seen many mattress and mattress store commercials. Tempur-pedic, Sleepy's (I have heard that jingle so many times I doubt I will ever forget it), etc. Gas stations - don't advertise because usually you don't have multiple stations right next to each other. Since the service is a commodity, everyone goes to the closest station. Why not two-faced - because it's easier to remember something if it's clear, well-defined, and repeated often, and that includes unconscious associations. No need to bring in cultural factors.

Retric 12y ago
Gas stations do advertise. Fill in the blank '___ with Techron'. You also see a list of gas stations at an interstate exit sign. http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/05/1869947/ads-at-interstate-exits-mean-revenue.html http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/05/1869947/ads-at-interstate... (third immage bottom right.) Anyway, there are lot's of forms of advertizing. From informative "talk to your doctor about ED" to simply memorable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcbasIb8lQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcbasIb8lQ However, the cultural inception idea is not about some sort of Pavlovian response. You don't actually get to taste what's for sale in a supermarket, so it's an abstract choice. And with little to no information to work off of you make a split second decision after split second decision which is draining. In that situation simple familiarity is worth a lot. Similarly, your not actually going to test drive every car in your price range on the market. That said, signaling is a big part of advertising. If nobody knows you just spent 20k on a watch it's harder to justify the purchase.

davemel37 12y ago

This article Is based on an incorrect assumption of the utility and function of branding ads. they don't change perception...they don't make a new impression...they support a pre existing perception and reinforce it. Brand perceptions and this cultural imprinting he refers to are driven by word of mouth, media coverage, and third party validation... Once we have a perception- ads reminds us of it. Yes, ego and peer pressure are strong emotional drivers of purchase behavior but so are dozens of other emotions we satisfy with various purchases.

dgreensp 12y ago

I agree that the primary mechanism of ads is to affect the "landscape of cultural meanings" so that a product is associated with a broader meaning or image, but I don't think this is so different from the Mad Men philosophy, or that making purchasing decisions to feed your external image is so much more rational, and more relevant, than feeding your self-image. Maybe you choose your household cleaners just to impress your guests. You wear Axe Body Spray because of what it communicates about you ("Hey girl, I'm wearing Axe Body Spray right now"). I don't need bystanders while I drink Corona in order to feel like I'm the kind of guy who'd rather be chilling on a beach far from the daily grind. I'm making a statement to myself about the kind of person I am, one who endorses those values or that fantasy. There's got to be a way to take the bystander out of the equation. If we want to maintain the idea that we are all rational thinkers -- only "culture" is irrational, or other people's subconsciouses! -- how about: the advertiser is selling us a bit of meaning, thereby increasing the value of the product. Meaning is hard to obtain, and making purchasing decisions based on advertisements is one way for rational individuals to obtain this scarce resource.

jsonne 12y ago

Imho a good ad, and more broadly a good brand, both has a cultural imprint piece and a "emotional inception" piece. Think of Chick Fil A. They've taken a strong stand on same sex marriage. They've made a cultural imprint on you in that you either support or don't support that lifestyle. So far so good right? However, you also feel something about that. You're either happy or upset about their brand. So not only are you associating that brand with your lifestyle, you're also having a feeling about that brand.

tbrock 12y ago

I don't buy it. This advertisement, especially the unreleased version narated by Steve Jobs, gives me goosebumps every time I watch it: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu6zeLSWq8 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu6zeLSWq8 I had such a strong emotional response to it that I remember watching it for the first time vividly from when I was little.

tedks 12y ago

Oh man. That's a doozy. Well, uh. >We may not conform to a model of perfect economic behavior, but neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a billboard. We aren't that easily manipulated. Yeah. Yeah we are. It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it and it's a really cool field. Like the author, I'm not going to cite specific sources in this comment, but anything in it is probably covered in Cialdini's Influence (a fantastic starting point for persuasion psychology) or Gass & Seiter's Persuasion (which is not as easy to read as Influence but is a better textbook). First off, advertisements definitely do work via simple association. Humans use liking as a heuristic for virtually all decisions (we decide in favor of things we like), so increasing liking increases purchases fairly reliably. A warmth appeal like a Coke ad with smiling faces will reliably create an association between Coke and positive emotions just because that's how humans are wired. If you activate two concepts together, you link them. This is just how humans work and is the basis of most of cognitive psychology. Many, many things make sense once you start to see things in terms of co-activation and priming. The author calls this emotional inception, but that's sort of... not a real term, so I'll just call it association, which is the actual term. You do associate Coke with positivity after seeing it often enough. That's the basis on which observational learning works, and observational learning is pretty obviously a thing. If you don't believe me on that you can pretty simply replicate some Banderas experiments with a 6 year old if you happen to have one lying around. The current cognitive model of persuasion closest to the truth (IMHO) is Kruglanski's Unimodel. But it's too complicated to explain here and the older models will work, so I'll use an older model here for the purposes of explanation. Older persuasion models posited that there were two routes to compliance: the central route, through the target's careful, rational consideration of options, and the peripheral route, through cognitively quick decisions made mostly on factors that are heuristic. This is a natural way of viewing things in a System 1/System 2 algorithms vs. heuristics world (for more on this see Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow). Humans almost never spend enough time on a decision for it to be considered rational in any way. Humans are wired with a fairly small amount of heuristics and we use those for literally everything. Liking, availability, and conformity are all we can muster in most cases. The author dislikes this, but doesn't offer any reason why it isn't true, and doesn't present any science as to why it isn't true, so... sorry man, but you might just have to accept humans aren't rational. I know it might be difficult to be a libertarian after that, but I'm sure you'll deal. Because of this, virtually all advertising is targeted at the peripheral route. All of the mechanisms the author discusses are peripheral cues: Associational priming to create liking, mere exposure effects, appeals to authority (sorry, saying 4/5 doctors recommend X is not a rational cue to buy X), brand image, resource expenditure (as if people who buy more expensive engagement rings are less likely to cheat -- I'd bet money the opposite is true!), and finally, what the author calls cultural imprinting, but is actually something like a mix of self-image manipuulation. Because of the mechanisms used for observational and social learning, images that don't actually give us food can create these cognitive links that later do cause us to buy products. When you see the Corona add, you notice a few things. The first is probably the attractive person of the gender you're attracted to. The advertisers nicely put two of them there, so you could be anything but asexual and have something to salivate over. You notice the open space and clear skies, and the beach, something you probably have a positive association with already with lots of nice sensory cues. Very last, you'd notice the text, which you have to manually process, and you'd notice that it says "Find your beach", which implies that drinking Corona will make you feel similar to these things. The ad has communicated that Corona will make you attractive, calm, and relaxed, which are all nice things on their own. The ad also does, as the author points out, establish another association on the meta-level, between people who drink Corona and people who have these qualities. This isn't terribly different from any of the other aspects of the ad, though, and it's certainly not a different mechanism. Ultimately it all comes down to making associations. I really hope the author and other interested people get into the actual science behind persuasion. It's a really fun field and it's very rewarding.

jonahx 12y ago

The abundance of laundry detergent, mop, swiffer, and other home cleaning ads seems like a counterexample to the points about bed sheets and gas stations. Toilet paper ads are another counterexample.

mieses 12y ago

This argument is spot on but we resist it because we think we are above culture, too smart for it, that we can reduce everything to science, analysis, and engineering. The opposite is true. Culture is everything. Your brain does not receive ads in a kind of tabula rasa clean room environment. Thanks for articulating this!

r0h1n 12y ago

>> Q: Have you ever seen an ad for bed sheets? Can you even name a brand of bed sheet? If ads work by emotional inception, wouldn't you expect to have seen at least a few ads trying to incept you with the idea that Brand X bed sheets are going to brighten your day? [2] By the same theory we should rarely ever see ads for mattresses too, since their "consumption is purely obscure". And yet, I'm bombarded by ads for mattresses everywhere.

ncavet 12y ago

Complete nonsense. Do you really believe that comms majors are being tought cultural inception in undergrad? The Corona ad, like all ads, is a response ne to a brief that is designed to address a business objective. In this case get people to drink Corona not just in the Summer. Hence find your own beach even if you live in Minnesota in the Winter and would normally reach for a winter beer. We don't sit around at agencies with our clients discussing the best way to mind fuck the public. Ads are tested on awareness, purchase intent, brand association and message association. Creatives reach for the stars. Clients and strategists pull them back to earth. Depending on the people involved. Some ads are great. Some suck. Case closed. - Ad Agency Guy (BTW none of us watch Mad Men)

estefan 12y ago
How they're made doesn't explain why they work or not. But having said that if that ad was run in the winter it could be interpreted in a very different way to if it was a summer campaign.

salmonellaeater 12y ago

There's an excellent book called Rational Ritual[1][2][3] which develops this idea much more fully. The thesis is that common knowledge (I know something, and I know everyone else knows it too) is very powerful and rationally drives people's behavior. One of the arguments in the book revolves around the absurd pricing of advertising during big public events like the Super Bowl. If advertisers weren't concerned about the common knowledge aspect of their messages, they would air their ads when the cost per viewer is lowest. And you do see this with non-social goods, which tend to be advertised during off hours. But companies producing social goods like beer pay much more per viewer for prime-time and Super Bowl slots in order to get their product into the cultural zeitgeist. If you see something in a Super Bowl ad, you know most other people have seen it too. [1] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9998.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9998.html [2] PDF of the original 2001 manuscript: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Chwe1.pdf http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Chwe1.p... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Ritual-Culture-Coordination-Knowledge/dp/0691114714 http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Ritual-Culture-Coordination-K...

chrismcb 12y ago
I would imagine the cost per viewer for a Super Bowl commercial isn't that high. Super Bowl commercials are expensive because there are so many viewers. In addition to the extra press surrounding them.
- salmonellaeater 12y ago
  Super Bowl ads cost about the same per viewer as prime-time TV slots ($35 per thousand in 2014). Both cost about four times as much per viewer as daytime TV. Primetime: http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4715 http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4715 Daytime: http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4710 http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4710
  - makomk 12y ago
    With daytime TV you can only reach consumers that are watching TV during the daytime though. That's a lot of potential customers that will never, ever see any of your ads.

pjbrunet 12y ago

"You could swap in a Budweiser or Heineken and no information would be lost." Corona is a lighter beer, which is what you want on a hot beach where you're sweating and thirsty. Yahoo Answers: Corona - 4.6% Heineken - 5.4% Budweiser - 5.0%

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dschiptsov 12y ago

All oversimplified models are naive nonsense, especially those which were developed to contradict another oversimplified models. It is the same flaw as to say 'clouds cannot be of this or that particular shape, they are always of this or that'. There are too many 'variables' in what we could call the [naive] psychology of a mind or so called Froidian psychology. Any undergraduate cognitivist would tell. It is not the naive this-OR-that 'logic' according which mental processes work. It is this-AND-that logic. BTW the author probably should study Wikipedia article about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is, of course, yet another oversimplified model.)

smsm42 12y ago

I've seen a lot of ads, for example, for household cleaning products (dishwashers, detergents, sponges, soaps, etc.) which are not social at all - they actually even more a-social than bedsheets, your house guests may happen to notice your bedsheets but would rarely know which soap you use to wash your dishes or windows. So while it sounds very persuasive for some products, one may easily poke holes in the concept applied universally.

scribu 12y ago
As the author mentioned at the beginning of the article, ads for household cleaning products work by making promises (if you use X toothpaste, your breath will smell fresher for 24 hours), instead of creating cultural signals (Beyonce drinks Pepsi).
- jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
  Well there is an element of cultural signaling going on. Washing up liquid like 'Fairy' in the UK usually feature an attractive mother in a middle class white household dealing with the state of their children's (usually boys) clothes after they've come home from soccer practise or school or what have you. The ad isn't saying Beyonce endorses the product, but it is saying that yes! you too can be like this supermom and effortlessly and jovially clean your kid's clothes for school tomorrow, so you look like a neglectful parent thanks to Fairy. Trust Fairy. Live Fairy. Fairy is love. Fairy is life.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

"So if a theory (like emotional inception) says that something as flat and passive as an ad can have such a strong effect on our behavior, we should hold that theory to a pretty high burden of proof." When I was adolescent I went to a(my first) music concert, it was an incredible experience, I even met my first girlfriend there. I was surprised that it was Coca Cola everywhere. For me this was freedom(from my home environment), adventure, joy, friendship, and even sex. Way more than pixels on the screen. Today is not Coca Cola. I do B.A.S.E jumping, love going downhill with my bike and when I go to see or meet the Gods of the trail or Skydiving doing incredible things(them,not me) I see REDBULL EVERYWHERE in the events they participate. Pixels on the screen are probably not that good, but they affect millions at the same time. Lots of people watch porn, even when it is just "pixels on the screen". A significant part of the advertising industry do not use pixels at all, they use text, they are called "copywriters" and what they do is tell stories.

DanBC 12y ago

> It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images. "You're never alone with a Strand" seems like a reasonable counter. > Q: Have you ever seen an ad for bed sheets? Can you even name a brand of bed sheet? If ads work by emotional inception, wouldn't you expect to have seen at least a few ads trying to incept you with the idea that Brand X bed sheets are going to brighten your day? Yes, I do see ads for bed sheets and for bed sheet makers. The author is just looking in the wrong places.

joars 12y ago

I would love to read this article in a shorter, more concice format. From the paragraphs I read the author spends most of his time trying to describe the common (mis)conceptions held by a layman in advertising by giving numerous citations and examples, which is weird and repetitive when his argument is that we already know and hold the assumptions.

joars 12y ago

jgamman 12y ago

thinking fast and slow is the book for you. nobel prize winner gives the skinny... and yeah, there's actual experiments that show merely familiarity breeds positive responses. NB there's a bit of commentary going on at the moment about the reproducibility of the experiments in this field

hownottowrite 12y ago

The Ehrenberg Bass Institute has quantitative marketing/advertising/brand results going back to the 50s. If you're interested in the math, I recommend checking out How Brands Grow by EBI director, Byron Sharp. [1] http://www.marketingscience.info http://www.marketingscience.info [2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195573560 http://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195...

RangerScience 12y ago

I've heard of this idea before under the term "Lifestyle Advertising". You don't sell the product, you sell a "culture" that "exists", with your product being a means to signal "membership" in that "culture". Things to Google: - LessWrong "Applause Lights" - Burning Man Ten Principles (specifically, Decommodification, Radical Self-Expression, and Participation) PS - I really like the point about "you need to know that everyone else knows what this means..." - that's a good point!