The effectiveness of environmental advertising: an analysis of advertising memory through neuroscience

Abstract

One of the key variables when analyzing advertising effectiveness is message recall. An advertisement is not only effective because it captures the public's attention, but it must also manage to remain in the public's memory. And of the many existing methodologies, neuroscience is the one that can help the most in the study of this effect based on the analysis of memory. On the other hand, environmental issues are becoming more and more socially relevant, so this research will try to understand the role of the focus of the advertisement and the awareness of the environment, by analyzing the memory provoked by the advertisements and determining which brain areas are activated. To do this, an fMRI experiment was implemented using scanners and supported by questionnaires on the attitude of 50 people towards the messages they had viewed. Our analyses indicate that subjects who have a higher level of concern for the environment remember negative advertisements to a greater extent. More specifically, the combination of self-report and neuroimaging techniques has confirmed the link between the memory of negative messages in environmentally concerned subjects and activity in regions that anticipate greater recall during message encodings, such as the amygdala and CMPF.