The Advertised Mind

Groundbreaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising

Kogan Page, 2005

15 min read

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Why do some ads work while others don't? How to understand advertising as a mental trigger.

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This treatise is designed for patient, methodical readers with a quest for insight. Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers' consciousness, so he reviews existing research on advertising, and includes cognitive science's understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level. His research is accessible, since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life, but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points. Du Plessis' results are accurate but may seem self-defining – such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember – and they can be difficult to apply. This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising. Given the intangible nature of creativity, a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection. Of course, the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway. getAbstract finds that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable, systematic approach, such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media.

Summary

The Challenge of Advertising

The purposes of advertising are: 1) Get consumers to notice the product; 2) Persuade them to buy the product; and 3) Build their positive association with the brand. The purposes sound clear, but the task is challenging because so many things are vying for the customers’ attention. To understand advertising fully, reformulate your assumptions to reflect current research about what makes ads effective and how the brain works.

Businesses have advertised for decades, but most of the people who make decisions about how, where, when and how often to advertise tend to make choices based only on their own experiences. For a long time, research that explains what makes ads work was scarce. Early research accented important but basic points, such as the need to expose potential buyers to an ad at least three times so they would remember it.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the broadcast media made great strides in improving its methods for measuring audience response to programming. At the time, advertisers had to use the media's available data, however sketchy, to try to determine how often they needed to publish or broadcast an ad for it...

About the Author

Erik du Plessis heads a marketing research and brand consulting firm in South Africa.

Erik du Plessis

The Advertised Mind

Groundbreaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising

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The Challenge of Advertising

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