We certainly are consistent… Over the past few years, we have had a very strong showing at the ADDY Awards and we did it again this year. We took home 16 ADDYs — eight gold, four silver, three bronze and a Judges’ Choice.
The majority of the honors we received were for the “Durable People” campaign created for the CORDURA® brand. We also won awards for work created for Georgia-Pacific Professional, Texas Farm Products, Invacare and for the agency itself.
Check out the press release here.
We are searching for a seasoned professional to run the Account Management Department at Howard, Merrell & Partners. Qualified candidates must have at least 15 years of agency experience, along with an entrepreneurial spirit and track record for developing business and brand strategies. Strong writing, communications and presentation skills necessary. Must have experience developing, managing and executing B2B and B2C multifaceted, national marketing programs for major brands. Campaign experience needs to include: branding strategy, market research management, writing integrated campaigns including traditional creative, interactive, media buying, public relations and direct response. Experience with personnel management and growth required.
Job responsibilities include: Serve as top-level client contact. Oversee all client activity. Appoint and direct the activities of the account management team at the agency. Ensure the agency’s clients receive strategic and professional counsel and service from the account management staff, resulting in accounts stability, increased business, and profit for the agency.
MBA required. Client-side experience, a plus.
Send resumes to: emaughan@merrellgroup.com
CONGRATS to Rett Haigler on his promotion to Account Supervisor. With client service as his top priority, Rett is truly commitment to helping each one of his clients meet their branding and marketing goals.
See here for the announcement.
We always think about reach, frequency, and cost per
impression when we evaluate media choices for an ad we want to
place. But we rarely if ever integrate the message with not
where, but how, the target audience receives it.
Research on how the body position of the recipient of a
message affects how they react to the message now shows that
both the ‘how’ and the ‘where’ matter. (Harmon-Jones, E., &
Peterson, C. K. (in press). Supine Body Position Reduces
Neural Response to Anger Evocation. Psychological Science)
Researchers found that when respondents were in a reclining
position, they were less likely to react by demonstrating
approach motivation, or the urge to move toward something.
Approach motivation is closely linked to positive activation.
Since this positive activation of emotion is what we usually
seek to elicit in advertising messages, that turns out to be
an important finding. If the viewer or listener is in a
reclining position, they are less likely to experience
positive approach motivation (defined as joy that urges one to
move toward the source of the joy).
The obvious issue here is television watching. Print ads,
radio, and interactive media are much more likely to be
accessed from a sitting position, compared to television (at
least that’s my assumption, there doesn’t seem to be much data
on that.) So the richness of television’s multimedia
experience may be working against the “LaZBoy factor”.
So how do we get the audience to sit up and listen? Maybe
with DRTV we need to get people to sit up with a free
sweepstakes offer or something, to increase their approach
motivation for the real offer.
And how about you? Do you sit up when you watch TV, or are you
lying down ignoring all those expensive ads we run?
Stimulating a strong emotional response on the part of the
viewer of an ad is critical if the ad is to be effective in
driving behavior. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us how to
create that emotional response from an ad. It just tells us we
want one.
Last week at our internal Lunch ‘n Learn, where we talked
about creative work, we looked at tv ads that had received
recognition in the business,and looked at how emotion worked
in those ads. Two of the most famous, and most-acclaimed,
were the original “Got Milk” ad, and the more-recent “Whopper
Freakout”. Both shared a common theme, taking away the brand
from the consumer rather than sharing it with him. I
suggested that the use of the counter-factual, absence rather
than presence of something, might have added emotional power.
It requires imagination, which can be a more powerful stimulus
than observation.
A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology now provides some solid data to support that
interpretation. For years happiness researchers have done
studies showing that acts of gratitude, such as writing notes
of appreciation, can have a significant positive effect on
individuals’ life satisfaction and happiness. Now the power
of the counter-factual has also been established. As described
in Mind Matters:
“The researchers show that people prompted to write about how
a positive event may not have happened experience a greater
uptick in mood than those prompted to describe the positive
event.”
In other words, feeling appreciation for a relationship you
have may not make you feel as good as imagining what your life
might have been like if you had never met the person.
If this trick of mental subtraction (What if I’d never met my
husband?) works for relationships, it seems logical that it
works for other things too (What if I couldn’t get a Whopper?)
The Consumer Insights Interest Group on LinkedIn today had a question about “What is the future of neuromarketing?” For those of you not in that group, here was my comment:
There are three streams of neuromarketing, and all will become more important in the future, because neuroscience and psychology has turned our understanding of decision making upside down.
1. Deep understanding of what happens in the brain, using fMRI. This will remain a fundamental research tool that will help us understand consumers at a basic level. But it will not become usable for tactical, or even strategic, marketing applications, because it will remain very expensive.
2. Gross understanding of what happens in the brain. Using EEG to understand what areas of the brain are active in response to marketing stimuli will continue to have a place. As Howard notes, its value is so far not established. We already have the means to measure conscious, cognitive events that take place in the brain by using traditional question and answer research. What is missing is an ability to understand what is going on at the non-conscious level, where emotions assemble and correlate the data that eventually get summed up as a conscious decision. I believe that EEG is going to have a difficult task finding consistent data that correlates to those emotional events. However, I am not an EEG specialist, so I am prepared to be wrong.
3. Understanding fundamental non-conscious emotional response by observing outcomes of changes in the autonomic nervous system. These include changes in skin conductance, heart rate, facial muscles, and eye movement. Before anything happens in the brain, our body is already reacting, and all of these signals are easily measurable. Emotions happen in the heart, not in the brain. And yes, there is a bank of data that a marketer can understand. While these signals are easily measurable, they are not easily interpretable. That is the area that is underdeveloped, and that is what we are working on. The AnswerStream system we developed at Howard Merrell is such a bank of data.
Traditional survey and qualitative methods will never go away. But they will become just one part of the toolbox. As our understanding of how human beings use emotion to make decisions expands, the importance of the “rational” choices we measure with techniques like conjoint will shrink.
We don’t usually like focus groups here at HM&P, but this one was different. While pitching a sock manufacturer, we got a little group together and asked a few questions. Very insightful.
The intuitions of artists never get the respect as truth realized that scientists get when they find ‘truth’ in the lab. On the other hand, it’s the rare scientist that brings home a Damien-Hirst-style paycheck. They probably both trump advertising, but us ad folks are always working somewhere at the point where art meets science.
Art and science rarely meet as completely as in Jonah Lehrer’s first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, which is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand the brain, emotions, and what it all means for advertising. The connection he makes between the fundamental truths of what great artists take from their own brains, and the science that has validated those truths is absolutely spell-binding. If you want to understand how to change the way people smell, feel, and taste the world– which is to say, if you’re one of us adfolk, you must read this book.
And while you’re at it, don’t miss his blog, either. Probably even more worthwhile than keeping up with Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.
Anyone interested in how emotions work in advertising needs to know about about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been in the news a lot the past few years, if you keep up with the science columns in places like the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, but surprisingly few people in the advertising world have been paying attention.
That’s too bad, because it’s probably one of the areas of science that is most likely to revolutionize how we understand advertising. Understanding mirror neurons will save us from a lot of bad mistakes. Hopefully.
Now you don’t need to troll the blogs and science columns to understand mirror neurons. Marco Iacoboni, one of the lead researchers in the field, has written a wonderful book that will tell you much more than I can about how they work and why they’re important. As he puts it, mirror neurons are the mechanism for empathy. They are the proof that “We are hard-wired to feel what others experience as if it were happening to us.”
Think about that next time you see someone experiencing pain in an ad. The Super Bowl ad with Justin Timberlake may have gotten a lot of buzz, but if you read this book, you’ll realize that it also hurt a lot of groins.
We’re all so steeped in the engineering paradigm for how our
brains and bodies work, that scientific findings like this
come as a surprise even though they shouldn’t. Our emotional
brains aren’t part of a computer system where vision, feelings,
heat and pain all run on different circuits. It’s all one big
system wrapped around itself. Via the blog Neurophilosophy, we
learn of a study by Canadian researchers that:
“provides the first direct evidence that the mood we are in
affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of
the visual cortex. Their findings show that putting on the
proverbial rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is not so much
about colour, but about the broadness of the view.”
They showed that influencing someone to be in a better mood,
by showing them faces of happy vs. sad faces, actually
improved their peripheral vision. The effect happened without
a negative cost to the information received in the central
vision field.
The message for us folks in advertising is clear. If you want
people to pay attention to what you’re saying, explosions and
loud noises may be exactly the wrong road to follow. Warm
them up and mellow them out first, and they’ll pay more
attention to what you show them.
