The Super Bowl has been over for nearly one month but I can't help pointing to a slightly strange and fascinating attempt to quantify the impact of
ads shown during the yearly contest. Marco Iacoboni and associates at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace
Brain Mapping Center used fMRI machines to observe the neural impact of Super Bowl ads in five volunteers. What they found is that what people say they think about the ads is often at odds with what their brain
activity suggests.These five volunteers brains responded most strongly in reward and empathy networks to Disney's spot, in which sports stars practiced the now stock phrase of every Super Bowl MVP: "I'm going to Disney World." Other winners included Sierra Mist and Budweiser via Bud Light. The GoDaddy ad, on the other hand, with its nubile star, failed to elicit much of a
response, perhaps giving lie to the old adage that sex sells. Likewise, the Aleve ad featuring Mr. Spock (also known as Leonard Nimoy) was a bust--but we all know Spock doesn't sell.
According to Iacoboni, these results point up a number of interesting findings but, perhaps most intriguingly, reveal a wide gap between what people say they think or feel as opposed to the actual activity in their brain. For example, during a Fed Ex ad a caveman ends up being crushed by a dinosaur. Although subjects described the ad as funny, it also elicited a strong response in the
amygdala, which governs responses to threats or
fear. They may not have consciously experienced fear, but their brains were assessing the threat of that dinosaur.Of course, one can rightfully wonder how well these five folks represent the hundreds of millions that tuned in. But the experiment shows how brain imaging may soon become a standard part of market testing and research. "I want to see more activity in the amygdala," some future ad exec might muse.