To install Flash 9 plugin please click here.
If you are sure that Flash 9 plugin is installed, please check that Javascript is
enabled in your browser.
Jane Raymond
The challenge in doing this study was to find differences in the brain when people are looking at information on paper versus on a video screen. One of the really innovative things about this study was the stimuli that we used.
In fact it was a great collaboration of all the various parties to bring together a set of stimuli that really looked like direct mail. And they were real advertisements from real companies with real information, colours, pictures, words, slogans, all the things that you would expect to see in real direct mail. And that information was identical on the video screen and on the piece of paper. So this was I think a great co-ordination and makes the study very valid and provided a very good representation of the, sort of, real world so to speak, as close as possible in the kind of context that you have to work in an fMRI setting.
One of the stunning things about this piece of research is that it shows that we value the knowledge that objects have a position in space, that they occupy a unique location in 3D space and the areas of the brain, the parietal lobes that are there to tell us where things are in the world, to help us map ourselves within the world, were more activated when people were looking at real pieces of paper as opposed to looking at video.
Graham Page
I think I agree with that. I think one of the most compelling findings in the study for me was this evidence that there was greater self referential processing of the marketing material when people encountered it in a tangible, physical, direct mail-like form relative to a more virtual form and that to me is, you know, great stuff from a marketer’s point of view.
Jane Raymond
It’s great stuff from a neuroscience point of view too because it fits in very nicely with the evolution of the brain. I mean the brain evolved to deal with real objects. We didn’t evolve to deal with information that floats in and out of a space like a video screen. So it fits very nicely with the idea that people would be more engaged with real physical objects than they would be on something that was appearing on a television screen or a video, here for a few seconds and then gone again.
Of course in these studies we ran relatively small samples of our participants because it’s very expensive. But also because the brain, human brains don’t vary that much.
Graham Page
Yeah, and I think that was an important point here about the differences between a study like this, which is trying to understand a general effect across lots of different types of individual creatives, and the sorts of work that you might normally do when developing a new campaign that’s about people’s idiosyncratic response to a specific creative.
Here we’re looking at effects which we don’t expect to vary across people because we are looking at the way brains work and different areas of the brain that, the way different areas of the brain are processing material. And that shouldn’t vary that much across people particularly once you go across lots of different creative material. Whereas if we were doing work that was specific to a specific campaign clearly we might want more people there because people’s individual response will be more variable and we'd need to look at that.
I think the best agencies, the best brand managers, are absolutely thinking in those terms when they design their campaigns. They give equal weight creatively to the various different expressions of the campaign idea. And I think that is something that we must encourage as an industry because then I think we’ll get the maximum benefit out of all the different parts of the campaign, including, in this case, people are responding emotionally to these more paper-based materials and that’s something therefore we need to give de-weight to in the creative process.