NeuroRelay

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the largest gathering of worldwide advertising professionals, designers, digital innovators and marketers. It takes place every year in June in Cannes, France, and celebrates the best of creativity in brand communication.

As neuromarketing research measures the effectiveness of advertising materials, it is interesting to follow the results of this year’s results of the research conducted by Neuro Insight, on behalf of AdNews. They have tested eight of the 2012 Cannes Lions winners,  measuring viewers’ brain activity (to determine the emotional response and long-term memory encoding) of  110 people (55 men and 55 women) aged 18-54, while exposed to the advertisements in a natural environment. Neuro Insight considers a ‘Peak Memory’ encoding for a TV ad if the value is 0.70 and above (their common range for most brain activity is 0.30 to 0.70). The red line represents activity on the left side of the brain and captures how the details of an ad are being taken in. The blue line is what is occurring on the right side of the brain and represents how bigger-picture impressions are being received (branding, music and landscapes, for example).

As AdNews reports, Neuro Insight chief executive Professor Richard Silberstein explained that “there are no questions asked. The result is a measure of what is committed (encoded) into long-term memory – whether consumers can recount it verbally is completely irrelevant. For an ad to have any effect, it must be committed, or stored, to long-term memory. Importantly, though, nothing across an entire TV commercial is encoded to memory with the same strength or at the same rate. So it is essential that any advertisement has high levels of memory during the visual and verbal moments of branding. Message and call-to-action are important, too, but they must be strong.”

Watch the video below to see the results for memory encoding, moment by moment for the ads: