Unaided recall is no reliable indicator for the impact of advertisements

Unaided recall is no reliable indicator for the impact of advertisements

For many years it seemed proven that high amounts of brain activity during the perception of advertisements lead to good unaided recall.

 

In the mid 1990‘s it occurred in one of our experiments that a significant number of test subjects showed high amounts of brain activity during the viewing of a TV-Campaign for a famous brand of German sparkling wine, but after the test they had little or no unaided recall of that particular TV-commercial. The TV-commercial was part of a commercial break that consisted of 11 TV-commercials, embedded into a TV-Show. The result was surprising to us, because until then it was state of the art in consumer research that high amounts of brain activity lead to good unaided recall.

 

Two weeks after that experiment we invited all test subjects with high amounts of brain activity and little or no memory again to come to our test studios. During the invitation by phone they were told they would take part in a test about a beverage. When they came to our test studios, the test was about sparkling wine. In the beginning we testet the effects of labels and the forms of bottles, without the label and bottle of interest. After that we asked the test subjects unaidedly, to spontaneously think of TV-commercials for sparkling wine. The TV-commercial of interest reached high amounts of recall. The correlation between brain activity from the first experiment and the „contextual recall“ from the second one showed a very high 0,86.

Provided someone memorizes a TV-commercial directly after a test-setting, because it was processed with a high amount of brain activity, it always goes along with good contextual memory days or weeks later. Starting at an age of 35 to 45 exclusive contextual memory occures much more often than with younger people. Our memory works more effectively when we reach a certain age. Regarding that, it doesn‘t make much sense to judge the impact of advertisements by unaided recall.

 

People 35 or older remember advertisements when the context becomes important, provided their brain activity was sufficiently high during the contact with the advertisement. Once you watch a TV-commercial that is part of a commercial break and is highly activating, the TV-commercial is also stored in your memory, even if you don‘t have any unaided recall directly after the viewing. Two or three weeks later you might be in a supermarket wishing to buy sparkling wine and exactly then you will remember the brand and details of the commercial (because now there is a context) and it will be considered for buying.

 

That has nothing to do with deterioration of memory when we get older (we are not talking about very old people, we are talking about 35-year olds). Starting from an age of 35 to 45 memory works more efficiently, important information is stored in a way to find it in a given context. That system of „drawers“ quite obviously isn‘t there that well developped in younger people, who comparatively rarely have contextual memory without direct unaided recall after the contact with advertisements.

 

Thus the sequences are:

• High amounts of brain activity + unaided recall directly after the presentation of stimuli, lead to contextual memory, disregarding the age (unaided recall gets less with rising age)
• High amounts of brain activity + missing unaided recall directly after the presentation of stimuli, lead to a small amount of contextual memory with younger people and to good contextual memory with people 35 and older.

 

The above result was validated by us several times during the past decade with different kinds of products. That throws a new light onto memory in consumer research.