Neuroscience of Ads
I chose a Kroger holiday commercial from 2022, which stuck out at the time because every time it came on it would make my dad tear up; when I look at it now, I can see the components of the ad that the creators used to illicit that type of response from viewers. The ad depicts a widowed gentleman who finds his wife’s old cookbook and starts cooking the recipes, which bring back joyful memories he shared with his wife. The ad then shifts to the present where the man is cooking a holiday dinner for his family. After viewing the commercial, my dad always explained that it made him feel so nostalgic for the times he has had with my mom and our family and thankful that he gets to continue to enjoy those times. Little did he know that the advertisers and maybe even a neuroscientist used specific techniques to influence the emotions that he felt when watching the commercial. The approaches neuroscientists use to increase the impact an ad has on its viewers drive the expression of responses by showcasing specific colors, sounds, and scenes that trigger memories, empathy, and emotions within a person.
During this Kroger ad, the colors shift from darker shades to light, bright shades, which took me from feeling a negative, gloomy feeling to positive feelings of renewal and happiness. According to David Berson, photosensitive ganglion cells detect light intensity which activates areas across the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum that produce image formation, motor control, cognition, and emotion. The ad also includes music and scenes that evoke nostalgia in the person watching the ad. One of the defining features of nostalgia is its relation to emotions which originates from a person’s meaningful experiences. The ad plays a song, Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls which was popular at the end of the 90s. By using a song that was familiar to a wide population of people, the ad creators ensured that their ad would evoke feelings of nostalgia in a larger population. The ad also uses scenes from moments that the man shared with his wife, showing when they met and times that they enjoyed together. When a person hears a song or sees a scene that they are familiar with or relates to their own experience, it is shown to activate the prefrontal, limbic, and reward-related regions like the substantia nigra which produces a positive response(Yang et al., 2022).
It is important to know the type of influence advertisers have on our response to certain stimuli so that we have more of a choice when it comes to the products we choose to put our money and time toward. Although we may not be able to control our automatic responses to these ads, we do have the cognition that allows us to ask why advertisers created the ad in a certain way and who their target audience may be. In the case of this Kroger ad, they use positive, nostalgic stimuli so that viewers will relate to their commercial during the holidays, in which most people are looking to connect with their family and friends and reminisce on memories of the past. The commercial may make us want to go straight to Kroger and start making our favorite family recipe or even choose Kroger over other stores just because we have a positive emotional connection to the commercial, but we may want to realize that ads may drive our tendencies and make uninformed choices when it comes to prices, freshness, or availability of products that we actually need.
References
Oba, K., Noriuchi, M., Atomi, T., Moriguchi, Y., & Kikuchi, Y. (2015). Memory and reward systems coproduce “nostalgic” experiences in the brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(7), 1069–1077. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv073
Researchers discover brain pathway that helps to explain light’s effect on mood. (n.d.). Brown University. Retrieved January 16, 2023, from https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-07-06/light-mood
Yang, Z., Wildschut, T., Izuma, K., Gu, R., Luo, Y. L. L., Cai, H., & Sedikides, C. (2022). Patterns of brain activity associated with nostalgia: A social-cognitive neuroscience perspective. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 17(12). https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsac036
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