The Advertised Mind by Erik du Plessis provides a fascinating and fresh
insight into how our brains work and respond to advertising.
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Brand trackers clearly need to include a component of emotional appeal, as well as rational product perceptions. Millward Brown Tracking Studies have long included such measures, and more detailed metrics have been developed to give a more granular view of the impact of marketing activity on emotional response to brands.
The Advertised Mind demonstrates the utility of advertising awareness as a pre-cursor of brand effects. Well branded, emotionally powerful copy will be more effective in sticking in memory, and colouring brand associations. And far from under-estimating the effectiveness of emotional copy, ad awareness measures will in fact reward it.
This reinforces the case, long established by sales validation and market mix modelling, for ad awareness as a key indicator of likely long-term advertising effectiveness. In addition, measures of the emotional response to marketing memories are also a key means to understanding the success or otherwise of marketing initiatives.