Healthy Bytes

$2.6 million of anxiety

read time: 195 words, about a minute

As you likely know, the Super Bowl “event” was this past Sunday in the U.S.
Because ad slots are so expensive during the Super Bowl, advertisers go all out and the ads tend to get quite a bit of attention.

A 30 second slot this year costs $2.6 million. That’s just the air time, not the cost of producing the commercial.

At the UCLA Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, they scanned brains of 10 volunteers as they watched the 33 commercials.

According to neuroscientists Dr. Joshua Freedman who was involved in the study:
“Fewer than 20% of the ads triggered nerve activity in the reward and satisfaction areas of the brain — those areas that are known to be involved in making associations and forming connections with people or things.”

So basically… not too many warm fuzzy feelings, and, folks may remember the commercial – but not the product.

Dr. Freedman continues…
“The majority of this year ’s commercials, on the other hand, predominantly activated anxiety regions of the brain, centered around the amygdala, the hub of our fear and emotional responses.”

Oh yea, last year over 50% of the commercials stimulated the reward and satisfaction area.

This entry was posted on Wed, 7.Feb.2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.