Brain Scans Show Bad News for Super Bowl Ads

It's the 'year of the amygdala' according to UCLA's Dr. Joshua Freedman. Nothing to do with the Chinese calendar – the amygdala is the brain's 'threat detector' and many of this year's Super Bowl commercials stirred it into action, according to tests in the University's high-field fMRI scanner.

Men and women aged 18-34 were recruited by FKF Applied Research and Dr. Marco Iacoboni's group at the UCLA Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Subjects viewed this year's Super Bowl ads while in the scanner, which monitors the activity in their brains.

This second Annual Ranking using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain imaging showed 'much more anxiety, and far less positive emotion' than last year's test, according to Dr. Freedman, who is UCLA Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and a co-founder of FKF. A few ads bucked the trend, with Coca Cola's 60 'Video Game' firing the region of consumers' brains associated with positive emotions. Doritos' 'Live the Flavor' ad and the Bud Light 'Hitchhiker' also fared well, while bottom ranking ads were those by Emerald Nuts and Honda, and Sprint's 'Connectile Dysfunction'. Dr. Freedman cites violence and economic fears as the cause of much of the anxiety, and adds: 'Coke's ad did well because it engaged a full range of emotions, including the mirror region, which is associated with connection and empathy'.

The firm says the technology, which measures activity in regions of the brain 'known to help control whether a consumer will buy or reject a marketer's sales pitch', has revolutionized neuroscience and 'peers more deeply than traditional methods like focus groups into the question of which ads are really effective with consumers.'

Dr. Freedman says between 1/3 and 1/2 of ads are typically filtered out and essentially ignored by viewers' brains. 'Usually the Super Bowl ads do somewhat better, but not this year. The majority elicited very little response.' In recent years indeed, many Americans have rated the ads as more of a draw than the game itself (DRNO www.mrweb.com/drno/news3779.htm and www.mrweb.com/drno2k/news2970.htm ), so this year's disappointing result may of course be a blip.

The group's Super Bowl rankings, along with color images of people's brain responses to the ads are online at www.FKFRank.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.