‘Not all screens are equal’ – new research reveals how to edit ads for mobile
Neuroscience expert Richard Silberstein explains how advances in understanding long-term memory can optimise adverts displayed on smartphones
Professor Richard Silberstein is one of the world leaders in neuroscience research in advertising. He can’t, he jokes, read your mind. But if you let him hook you up to an SST (Steady State Topography) headset while watching a commercial, you’ll be shocked at quite how much he can deduce.
“We measure the speed of processing in different parts of the brain,” Silberstein explained at Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit. “What that means is that we can record a sense of engagement. How intense an experience it is. Do you like it? Are you paying attention? And we can also tell whether a piece of information will be stored in your long-term memory.”
Professor Richard Silberstein addresses Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit
Neuro-Insight provides neuroscience-based market research to businesses. Headquartered in Melbourne, it has offices in US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Absolutely fascinating. Given the right hemisphere’s association with the emotional components of our brain, might there also be a link between the mobile phone and the interpretation that it serves as some sort of ‘security blanket’?
Sorry, the plumber just arrived. To finish my question, is it possible that the nature of the relationship between user and mobile phone is sufficiently different from the relationship between user and other screens so as to affect the absorption of the screened communication?
Thanks for your question Antony – this is certainly a possibility, although from the current data we have collected it wouldn’t be possible to say so. A separate study would be required to answer this hypothesis. More broadly our interpretation for the differences in processing seen across different screens are derived from perceptual neuroscience. Consuming media on a smaller screen forces you to take in more of the overall ‘picture’ simply as a function of the screen size – it would require more effort to constantly focus on the individual onscreen elements which are considerably smaller than what is found on larger TV screens.
Thanks for responding Shaun.