Advertising needs to be emotionally absorbing. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant, stale and ineffective. The mind is geared to filter out stimuli, requiring emotion to achieve breakthrough.

How big is the challenge of trying to secure the awareness – let alone the enduring emotional engagement – of consumers? Huge, of course. People are awash in information and glad to tune out what they don’t need, which is why it is increasingly difficult to create a successful ad.

Over a five-year period during the late 1980s, for instance, separate market research firms tracked the percentage of US and West German viewers who remembered the last commercial they had seen on television. The decline was over 40 per cent in America and nearly 20 per cent among the Germans. More recently, a third research firm found that in cluttered markets like the United States and Japan, TV commercials are only half as capable of increasing awareness as they are in countries with fewer commercials being aired per week. And that’s just looking at the marketplace.

How about the mind? In that case, even under the best circumstances establishing awareness is difficult. The human brain takes in 400 billion bytes of information per second through our senses. But it only consciously processes 2,000 bytes. That ratio should make it evident that when it comes to awareness, keeping the door shut – not open – is far and away our basic impulse. In other words, filtering or screening out takes precedence over input.

As 400 billion bytes makes clear, the mind has remarkable elasticity when it comes to absorbing data. The problem lies in processing it all. Perhaps the authors of The Attention Economy put it best when they described sensory input as being processed in a large funnel. The narrow spout is what behavior actually results from the influence of so much input. Let’s add a little more detail to the five key stages of their metaphorical funnel to get a grasp on how emotions and advertising interact.

There are five decision making stages advertising must impact to be effective.

Stage 1: Awareness

This stage is about noticing something, becoming aware of it. Advertising proliferates in the hope that consumers will recall some of it. If properly diagnosed, recall is the first place in the funnel where emotion matters. That’s because we remember something for only one of two reasons: it either sparks an emotional response or easily corresponds to something we have already retained. At this earliest stage, emotions serve as mobilizers. They’re like an early-warning system, alerting us as to whether we might want to approach or avoid the advertising in question for innate, subconscious reasons we might not be able to articulate.

Stage 2: Narrowing

Survival instincts help explain the next, narrower part of the funnel. To function most effectively and ward off threats, people have to focus first and foremost on what they feel will matter most. Thus at this stage, emotions serve as relevance signalers. They turn on – and stay on – when a goal is at stake. To avoid being winnowed out at this stage, advertising must enhance or protect our lives.

Stage 3: Attention

This is the consideration stage. Here emotions serve as motivators, fueling our response as we contemplate the advertising. This is where creating sustainable interest is vital. Advertising that isn’t ultimately very likeable or appealing will drop from consideration. That’s typically for reasons related to the execution. The effort required to comprehend the advertising may be too taxing or else, more strategically, the advertising fails to square with people’s emotionally-based belief systems.

Stage 4: Decision

This is as far as research can go in validating, prior to launch, whether advertising is likely to drive marketplace response. As will be discussed in the last part of the chapter, companies are looking for purchase intent or other forms of persuasion. In emotional terms, what they want to know, based on emotions serving as evaluators, is what’s the gain versus harm equation? Emotions are judges of value. In judging the advertising, consumers are also judging whether the branded offer is worth pursuing.

Stage 5: Action

Only the post-launch tracking of sales results is truly relevant here. By this point, emotions have reached the critical point of serving as enactors. We take action either to change or regain the status quo. As a means to an end, the advertising will have caused people to resolve, evade or mitigate a situation that the advertising promised the offer could help us handle. Only the sensory and emotional parts of the brain attach to muscle activity. The rational brain serves as a lobbyist, which is why functional benefits don’t matter much unless they acquire emotional significance (often thanks to the advertising).

Finally, after all is said and done and the consumers’ monies are spent, emotions and advertising have one final rendezvous. That happens because emotions also serve as monitors. As part of being evaluators, they monitor the degree or quality of the progress we’ve made as a result of the action we took. Here informal word-of-mouth advertising becomes an important alternative source of information. That’s because as noted by many business people, there’s nothing worse than great advertising on behalf of a terrible offer. Spurred to buy only to be disappointed, we then emotionally and financially withdraw – in favor of investing our time and money elsewhere.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Dan Hill, excerpted from his book, Emotionomics, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

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When Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment was re-created in the middle of New York City for Hulu, it blew up the internet with the help of consumers and the media generating a swell of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The physical experience was something people waited in line for hours to see, knowing it would only be around for a few days. What’s more, they transformed their in-person experience into social and digital content that was shared again and again. In this session, Hulu shared how the power of experiential as a channel made a lasting mark on the brand.

This Father’s Day, Schneiders is celebrating dads everywhere with this heartwarming film about traditions.


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Creative Credits:
Advertising Agency: john st., Toronto, Canada

Executive Creative Directors: Angus Tucker, Stephen Jurisic
Creative Director: Niall Kelly

Art Director: David Glen

Copywriter: Noah Feferman
Agency Producer: Aimee DeParolis
Director of Client Service: Heather Crawley
Account Director: Sandra Avey
Account Supervisor: Matthew Bendavid
Director of Strategic Planning: Jason Last
Strategic Planner: Fanny Rabinovitch-Kuzmicki

A new way to practice for the SAT. The SAT, a standardized college admissions exam, is a mammoth test, and every minute of practice is invaluable. But SAT practice courses can be expensive — which oftentimes means kids with less money, or from disadvantaged backgrounds, do worse. One year ago, Khan Academy, a free online platform for learning, uploaded the Official SAT Practice test on its site and the results are in: more than 1.4 million unique visitors, consisting of a wide array of races, ethnicities and income levels. Now, Khan Academy is introducing more features, including live help, subject-matter experts and more tests. (Watch Salman’s TED Talk)

Wikipedia’s stance on censorship. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is the subject of a Vice interview on the importance of a free and open Internet. In countries like China where censorship is common, access to certain Wikipedia pages is blocked, but censorship of this kind strikes at the very heart of Wikipedia’s mission to provide neutral and factual information to people around the world in their own language. “If governments deter people from finding neutral and factual information, the whole idea of Wikipedia crumbles,” says Wales. (Watch Jimmy’s TED Talk)

When to intervene in domestic violence? Always. What would you do if your friend or loved one was experiencing domestic violence? But what if both the victim and the abuser are your loved ones, close to you in separate but important ways? In a strikingly honest Refinery29 essay, iO Tillett Wright describes the difficult decision to finally call 911 on his friend’s behalf. Numerous reports of violent, bloody encounters motivated Wright to intervene, despite stark emotional complexities. “I realized that as long as I was protecting the abuser from consequences, I was enabling the abuse and I could no longer partake. I had to stand up for my friend, and for what I believe in my gut to be the code of conduct by which human beings have to behave with each other. Whether we loved him or not has nothing to do with it. When it comes to violence, “love” is no longer part of the equation.” (Watch iO’s TED Talk)

A circular solution for plastic. Endless piles of washed-up, discarded plastic choke our natural environment and are economically wasteful. Dame Ellen MacArthur addressed this at the World Economic Forum by introducing her report  The New Plastics Economy, a three-year-long project that uses a circular-economy model for plastic management. Just four months later, this bold idea is already in action: an inaugural workshop of over 40 industry leaders and city representatives met to outline core goals. MacArthur has high hopes for the project.”It seeks to create a shared sense of direction, to spark a new wave of innovation and to move the plastics value chain – starting with plastic packaging – into a positive spiral of value capture, stronger economics and better environmental outcomes.” (Watch Dame Ellen’s TED Talk)

A promising new tool for genetics. Pardis Sabeti is part of a multi-institutional research team applying a new technique to an old problem: identifying which genetic variants cause increased risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases. While stretches of DNA that put individuals at risk have been identified, each stretch can contain hundreds of variants. This makes pinpointing which variant actually causes the increased risk difficult, and current techniques struggle to meet the demands of analyzing tens of thousands of variants. But a new paper by Sabeti and team in Cell documents the ability of a new technique, massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA), to analyze thousands of variants and identify which affect gene regulation. (Watch Pardis’ TED Talk)

If an animal can think like us, should they have rights? A person is held captive for life; part of the mental torment is that they understand their fate and that there’s no hope for freedom. A chimpanzee, a non-human animal with advanced cognitive abilities, is put in a cage and consequently, understands that there is no hope. Is this torture, does this animal have rights? Animal rights lawyer Steven Wise is the focus of a new documentary Unlocking the Cage, which features his fight to rid Tommy the chimpanzee of his “legal thing” status and set him free. (Watch Steven’s TED Talk)

Police force pioneer for governor. On May 29, Kiran Bedi was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, a Indian Union Territory composed of four unconnected districts. The appointment is a natural progression for someone who has shown a dogged commitment to reforming and bettering her community. On Bedi’s agenda? A goal as big as helping Puducherry’s tourism, agriculture, fisheries, and health flourish. (Watch Kiran’s TED Talk)

Crochet’s importance to mathematics. Margaret Wertheim and her sister Christine render coral reefs in crochet. While coral reefs and crochet may not immediately appear compatible, sea life like corals, kelps, sponges, and nudibranches embody a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry, and the only way we know how to model this is through crochet. To the sisters, the Crochet Coral Reef project represents the importance of embodied knowledge, “what we want to propose, is that the highest levels of abstraction, things like mathematics, computing, logic, etc. — all of this can be engaged with, not just through purely cerebral algebraic symbolic methods, but by literally, physically playing with ideas.” Now one of the largest participatory science and art projects in the world, the Crochet Coral Reef celebrates its 10-year anniversary. (Watch Margaret’s TED Talk)

Creative Credits:
Agency: Agência3, Brazil
Chief Creative Officer: Paulo Castro
Creative Director: Felipe Gaúcho
Art Director: Lucas Queiroz
Copywriter: Flávio Chubes
Photographer: Casa 13 Produtora de Imagem
Retoucher: Casa 13 Produtora de Imagem

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Danish ad agency & Co. created a pretty cool campaign for Stroer Out-of-home Media to showcase how it is not only striking back against its digital counterparts in ad blocking and claims, it’s winning.

Creative Credits:
Advertising Agency: &Co., Copenhagen, Denmark
Art Directors: Kristoffer Winther Sørensen, Ole Hoffmann, Jeppe Hansen
Illustrator: Morten Grundsøe

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Normally, “Skype Granny” Lesley Keast  lives in Spain and appears as a giant face on a screen in the School in the Cloud learning lab in Gocharan, India. But in the days before the first-ever School in the Cloud conference, she got a chance to visit the lab and meet the students she’d been mentoring from afar. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.”

Mitra shared this in a presentation at the first-ever School in the Cloud conference, held in India last February. The conference brought together those who’ve been a part of the education initiative — which encourages kids to explore interesting questions online — since Mitra founded it with the 2013 TED Prize. The school now consists of eight learning labs in India, the UK and US, and an online platform that lets students anywhere participate with the help of retired educators who guide sessions over the cloud. In the five days before the conference, 15 of these “Skype Grannies” gathered to tour four labs in India with Mitra. Traveling by plane, boat and rickshaw, they got a chance to meet the students they’d been working with face-to-face. By coincidence, the tour took place on the eve of the Saraswati Puja festival, which celebrates the Hindu goddess of learning.

In his presentation at the conference, Mitra shared four stories from the tour — each from a different lab, and each centered around a question that pushed attendees to think about the future of education. Below, the stories and the questions they illustrate.

Is learning to read a form of problem-solving?
From “Area One” in Korakati, West Bengal

In Korakati, the most remote of the School in the Cloud labs, deep in a mangrove swamp, Sugata observed a young boy who knew the English alphabet, but didn’t know how to read or speak English. The boy had watched three older kids playing a game, and wanted to try it on another computer in the lab. So he copied the letters of the web address down on a piece of paper, and searched the keyboard carefully to be able to type the letters. Soon, about six children gathered around him to play the game too.

At first glance, this boy was only playing a computer game. But upon closer inspection, he acted on personal initiative, and solved a big problem in order to make the technology work for him. What this boy did is not reading — but it is learning. This kind of creativity should be rewarded, too, says Mitra.

Does learning have to be direct, or can it meander?
From “Area Two” in Chandrakona, West Bengal

The Chandrakona lab is nestled within potato fields in rural West Bengal. Here, a granny showed four boys a volcano experiment on YouTube that involved baking soda and vinegar. Because of connectivity issues, the boys wanted to download the video, to access in case they lost their connection. But there was a problem: they didn’t know how to download a YouTube video.

One of the boys suggested asking the computer itself. After a bit of Googling, they found a video on how to download YouTube videos. But watching the video required downloading free software, which required an email address. The group was stumped again — none of the boys had email.

Working together, the boys learned how to create a fake email address. They downloaded the software. Then watched the video. And finally, downloaded the volcano experiment video. By working as a team and going step-by-step, says Mitra, they learned so much in addition to the science behind a chemical reaction.

A group of Skype Grannies toured four School in the Cloud learning labs in India with TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. Many of the moments they witnessed became stories that Mitra shared in his keynote presentation at the School in the Cloud conference. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

How do peers spark each other to learn?
From “Area Zero” in Gocharan, West Bengal

“Area Zero” is the School in the Cloud’s flagship TED Prize lab — a sleek, solar-powered learning lab set amid palm trees. There, a boy demonstrated an interactive computer program that he’d taught himself to code — a “chatbot” that lets the computer carry on basic conversations in English. At the program’s prompting, Mitra typed in his name. “Hi Sugata,” the computer responded. The computer asked where he lives, and Mitra asked the same of the program. “I live in Gocharan, inside a computer,” the chatbot answered.

The program piqued the interest of several younger children at the lab, and sparked several to experiment with coding on their own. This made coding a focus of their School in the Cloud sessions. Mitra points out that no one had to plan lessons to teach the topic. Instead, the kids were so inspired, they felt compelled to teach themselves.

What can students learn from teaching?
From “Area Four” in Phaltan, Maharashtra

In the bustling city of Phaltan, the School in the Cloud lab sits within a traditional school, and kids participate in a session each week. Here, a group of students puzzled over a hard question, not quite finding what they needed online. When a group of older students walked by an open window, the younger students asked for their help. The older kids jumped in. But instead of showing the younger kids where to look, the older students employed “the Granny method,” and provided encouragement as the children circled in on a promising direction themselves.

The younger students learned about the problem at hand, says Mitra, but the older children learned too. They got an active lesson in how to give guidance, and sharpened their own skills for locating information.

Mitra’s point in telling these four stories: Traditional education is based on testing and assessment, but many things that have a big impact on children aren’t easily measured. The School in the Cloud pushes education toward something more thematic and fluid. Mitra describes it as “learning at the edge of chaos,” and measuring chaos — or curiosity, for that matter — is no easy task.

When these students at the School in the Cloud lab in Phaltan, India, felt stumped on a question, a group of older students popped their heads through a window and offered encouragement. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

Want to be a part of the next chapter of School in the Cloud? Learn more »

Kit-Kat creates ‘the breathing room’ to help young people in Spain study for exams. The agency DoubleYou created the “the break room,” a soundproof cabin installed inside the library that allows students to blow off steam for a few minutes exceptionally and without disturbing anyone.

“We saw an excellent opportunity to not only make tangible the famous ‘break’ brand but to be useful to our target. Thousands of young people have been they bowed elbows coming weeks and is proven to make small pauses helps perform better in school, “said the agency in a statement.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Creative Credits:
Advertising Agency: DoubleYou, Spain
Executive Creative Director: Xavi Caparrós
Creative Director: Ximo Villalba
Senior Copywriter: Esther Carrasco
Art Direction: Luís Villalba
Designer: Berta de la Iglesia
Client Service Director: Alba González
Account Director: Ángela Linés
Senior Account Executive: Maite Zamora
Account Executive: Pau Huéscar
Tech Director: Álvaro Sandoval
Interactive Director: Jose Rubio
Multimedia: Octavi Figueres
Producers: Blua Producers
Production AV: Glassy Films

Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker are two writers who collaborated on a literary and economic experiment between 2009 and 2010, to discover whether adding meaning to an object would draw attention and sway people to buy it for more money than it’s worth.

They bought knickknacks at thrift stores for a total of $129. They paid no more than $2 per object and asked various professional writers to compose a story for each object. Then they posted each item with its story on eBay and watched what happened.

A beat-up motel room key cost them $2. The story, written by novelist Laura Lippman, began with a wife putting away her husband’s knickknacks. She asked him why he had kept the key for so many years. On the key was engraved Perkins Motel, Laconia, NH, Room 3. The husband replied that the key reminded him of the movie Psycho (the actor’s name was Anthony Perkins, which he thought “was cool”). When the wife was unimpressed, he mentioned a trip to that motel with a “bunch of guys” in junior college and he forgot to return the key and has had it since. “Here’s the moment where you choose to believe, or not to believe,” the wife reflects. “A marriage is a kind of religion, defying rational thought.” She realized that motel rooms no longer use traditional keys anymore, even in Laconia, New Hampshire. Whatever memory her husband treasured may have been beyond one shared with a “bunch of guys.” She wondered if he wanted to keep the story to himself, for her sake or his, and not spoil what may have happened in Room 3.

The key sold for $45.01.

The writer Ben Ehrenreich tells the story about a jar of marbles and starts with an irresistible statement: “I pull a marble from your skull each time we kiss. ‘Give it back,’ you say, each time.” The rest of the story is a surreal dialogue between two people during which we move from hunchbacks, to Noam Chomsky, to Beyoncé, to the narrator’s lover arranging TV remotes attractively, to Vladimir Putin in the form of a crow, being the narrator’s friend on Facebook. When we get to the final scene, we are left with this paragraph to ponder: “And I kiss your fingers and your dry lips and with my free hand I reach up and I stroke your hair and I poke about until I feel the bulge and then I dig in with my nails and pull another marble from your skull.”

The jar of marbles was bought for $1 and sold for $50.

Overall, the Significant Object project made $8,000 and beautifully illustrates the impact of meaning in making decisions.

Reflecting on your own content whether it be a presentation, blog, marketing campaign or training program consider this: At any moment, the world is filled with sights and sounds that simultaneously compete for your listeners’ attention. The human mind is limited in its ability to process information and selects only relevant stimuli that receive priority for further processing. In a world of constant data explosion, how do we create meaningful content that leads to recall and influences decisions?

Give your audiences the thrilling relevance of Room 3.

To Do That Consider These Nine Steps To Distinctiveness:

1. Distinctiveness is important for long-term memory because isolated items draw more attention and rehearsal time. In addition, isolated items come to the foreground, reducing interference with other items, and also appear in smaller numbers, which makes them easier to recall long term.

2. The more similar things are, the harder it will be to retrieve them later. However, similarity is important for the brain to detect distinctiveness.

3. The brain is constantly looking for rewards. In business, when many messages are the same, we can create distinctiveness, and therefore improve recall, by being specific about these rewards, which we can frame as tangible results.

4. If you’re not first to market, observe pockets of similarity in your domain and then strike with distinctiveness. Allow your audiences’ brains to habituate to similarity; it will be easier for your message to stand out.

5. The more an item differs from other items, the bigger its 
effect. Select a property you want to isolate and increase its distinctiveness by at least 30% compared with neighboring items.

6. Find opportunities to deviate from a reality your viewers have learned to expect.

7. Create distinctiveness by thinking in opposites. This is helpful not only because it helps the brain distinguish some stimuli more strongly than others, but also because contrast is a shortcut to thinking and decision-making

8. Enable self-generated distinctiveness.

9. Achieve distinctiveness with a human touch and deep meaning.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Carmen Simon, PhD, co-founder of Rexi Media and the author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions

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Pat Mitchell, curator of TEDWomen, shares this report with the TED Blog:

In April, I had the privilege of moderating a discussion at the Skoll World Forum on the subject of “Leading Through Adversity.” My panel consisted of four powerful women: Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president (watch Mary Robinson’s TED Talk); Halla Tómasadóttir, a good friend who is now campaigning to be president of Iceland (watch Halla Tómasadóttir’s TED Talk); Alaa Murabit, an activist who founded The Voice of Libyan Women (watch Alaa’s TED Talk); and Rev. Canon Mpho A. Tutu, daughter of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, and an ordained Episcopalian minister in South Africa.

All of these women know a lot about leading through adversity. They talked about the need for more women in leadership positions and shared their ideas about what it takes to be a strong leader.

One big takeaway from the Skoll World Forum session — and from many other conversations I’ve had over the years about women’s leadership — is that the decision to become a leader is one that is often made early in one’s life. We began by talking about some of the formative experiences the women had had early on in their careers.

Mary Robinson first ran for political office in her early 20s. During that first campaign, she took a controversial and courageous stand on reforming family planning in Catholic Ireland. She became an object of hatred overnight, denounced from pulpits and the recipient of bags of hate mail. She still won, serving 20 years in Parliament and then seven years as president. “If you really believe in something and want it,” she explained, “you’ve got to pay a price – and you’ve got to be prepared to pay a price.”

Learning that lesson at a young age helped her to find the strength to maintain her values and principles while under attack throughout her political career, especially when she was seeking ways to build consensus. These are skills she continues to use in her work as the climate ambassador for the UN.