WHAT THE NEW PARADIGM IMPLIES FOR ADVERTISING AND RESEARCH

1. The emotional and rational are not two conflicting things in the brain, but work together towards the survival of the organism:

• emotions direct attention, so that the organism recognises things it should avoid or approach.

• emotions set the soma against which observation is rationally interpreted.

2. Emotion is a physiological reaction that occurs autonomously in the limbic system as part of the interpretation of observations, prior to the interpreted observation being used in the rational frontal lobes.

3. An emotion has three dimensions.

• Direction towards or away from what is observed.

• Intensity.

• Urgency do it quickly, or take your time, or not important.

In consumer language this is reflected by a scale ranging from hate, fear to dislike, irritate, antipathy to like to love. This scale combines direction and urgency.

5. While positive emotions in advertising are not a pre-requisite for effective advertising, indications from both the SPOT study in Holland (TV) and Sanoma magazines' STOP/WATCH study in Belgium (print) are that emotions account for more than 40% of the effectiveness of advertisements.

6. The best surrogate measure for the autonomic emotional reaction appears to be ad liking.

7. Emotions attract attention to the ad (which enhances memory laydown), and this is reflected in awareness measures like recall. Recall measures favour emotional advertising, rather than penalise it as Krugman hypothesised. Esther Thorsen was the first to show this empirically.

8. Positive emotions create a positive 'soma' against which the ad is experienced, created by, among other things:

• humour

• aspirations

• new information, relevant to the viewer, about the brand

• reminders of positive experiences with the brand.

9. Negative emotions still attract attention, but create a negative soma, caused by anything in the ad that irritates people.

10. People will not give attention to ads that are deemed familiar (just another ad), or that they find confusing.

11. There is a general belief among UK advertisers that US advertising attempts to be brash and intrusive in an effort to grab attention. UK advertising agencies ascribe this to US advertisers being enamoured of recall measures in the 1970s. The LeDoux-Damasio paradigm argues that to achieve attention it is a good idea to use positive emotions in advertising, rather than shout or irritate to grab attention. Brash advertising leads to a negative soma, and will undo the benefits to creative advertising of using emotions in a positive way.

The new paradigm favours UK-type creativity over US-type creativity.

12. The new paradigm about the role of emotions does not require new metrics to measure advertising, but leads to better understanding of the output from existing metrics.

13. Most large-scale industry-sponsored studies, like the ARF's CRVP study, the Dutch SPOT study, the Millward Brown ADTRACK database, the Belgian STOP/WATCH print study, all provide empirical evidence that supports the new paradigm.

14. Most of what humans do is at a low- attentive level. Nature protects us from being highly attentive, or emotional, or highly aroused all the time, because this would lead to the human system burning out.

Advertising will seldom be consumed in a high-attentive level. However, views that advertising works in low-attentive ways and therefore requires recognition measures to be measured are Krugmanian and part of old-spectacles thinking.

The function of emotion in advertising is merely to shift the attention given to an ad slightly up the scale.

15. Recall and recognition are complementary measures.

• Recognition approximates campaign reach and is time insensitive.

• Recall measures awareness and brand linkage.

• The difference between the two (recognition minus recall) measures attention and also brand linkage. It is an important (and dynamic) metric affecting the media planning for an ad campaign.

• Using recognition alone will mostly lead to an under-spending media plan, penalising frequency – to the extent that even an effective advertisement might be made non-effective.

16. Understanding emotions in an ad campaign is largely an issue of developmental work and input into the creative process, probably involving more qualitative than quantitative research. Pre-testing should be mainly concerned with whether the desired emotions are created and could be enhanced. Post-tracking only needs to verify that the emotional component of the advertisement is not wearing out.

17. It is important for multi-national advertising to recognise that all cultures experience the same emotions, but what gives rise to those emotions can be different. Some executions that create great positive emotions in one culture may create no emotional reaction, or even a negative reaction, in another.

'It seems logical that if advertisers use positive emotions in their ads to attract attention, people will generally like advertising and be less inclined to opt for devices to avoid it'