The Cancer Council's tribute to Aussie pop icon Chrissy Amplett touched the judges' imaginations at Cannes this year and it won four Lions, including a Silver in branded Content.
But a look at the brain science behind the ads shows that while the moving video gets its message across, the call to action to visit the website misses the mark. It's a score for the message, but the Cancer Council brand isn't strongly associated with it.
As part of our exclusive series of neuro-analyses of the winning ads at Cannes this year in partnership with Neuro Insight, we took a look at how viewers' brains respond to the Cancer Council’s musical tribute.
Truly Touching
The Cancer Council “I Touch Myself” ad is beautifully moving and stays with you long after you’ve seen it. It uses Divinyl’s song “I Touch Myself” in tribute to Chrissy Amphlett, lead vocalist of Divinyls, who lost her battle to breast cancer last year. The ad features 10 of Australia’s leading female singers who have each recreated a section of the song in their own way. The ad is simple, yet sophistically crafted in black and white with the camera panning from one women to the next. The women are all filmed naked, from their shoulders up, singing a section of the song. The final image is confronting, yet still beautifully created; it reveals a topless breast cancer survivor who decided to undergo a preventive double mastectomy at age 27. The campaign was released on the anniversary of Chrissy’s death and the “I Touch Myself” song has become an anthem for breast cancer to remind women of the importance of self-examinations. The ad won a Silver Lion for Branded Entertainment for the Use of Music in an ad. As the ad is targeted at women, predominately, we shall look at their Memory Encoding first.
Website or Message Awareness?
Often ads, although they are masterfully done, their message doesn’t get through to viewers or is lost. Let’s see if that is the case here.
Now, it’s all very well to have such a strongly performing ad, with most of it being committed to memory – but there is no branding, no hint at all to what the ad is about, until the final scenes. It’s not out of the ordinary for advertisers to do this – but does it work? In this case, yes it does – in a roundabout way.
As we can see from the video, the ad performs well in the female audience. It starts off low, but then Memory Encoding is triggered when the next singer chimes in. Memory levels fluctuate throughout the ad, but the continual changing from singer to singer (each who are very different from the previous one) keeps the interest going and manages to sustain these high levels of processing through the piece, averaging around 0.7 for most of the ad (0.7 is Neuro-Insight’s Benchmark for Effectiveness).
The final branding scene, showing the super of “ITouchMyself.org” is only moderately effective and is unlikely to be committed to memory, as it scores below 0.7. In part, this drop in memory encoding is driven by the appearance of the final black screen that triggers Conceptual Closure. For an explanation of Conceptual Closure, please see the previous Lurpak butter ad analysis. However, the preceding scenes of the slow reveal of the young Cancer survivor’s scars elicits a strong Memory Encoding response from the female audience, as well as a strong positive emotional response (not shown here). The key message of “Touch Yourself. A Breast Cancer Anthem for Chrissy Amphlett” is communicated effectively as well. What this means is that women have processed that the ad is about Breast Cancer, which means that the ad has been successful in creating awareness, but the organisation behind the ad has not been effectively encoded in memory and hence the narrative of the ad is not linked to the organisation sponsoring the message. However, this is not necessarily a problem as the ad has achieved what it set out to do which is to remind women to regularly self-examine.
Confronting?
Was this message also successfully carried across to the male audience, considering they’re not the target audience? Let’s see what their Memory Encoding Time series Reveals:
Male viewers are instantly captured by the opening visuals of the ad which elicit a very strong Memory Encoding response. The ad then manages to maintain a high level of Memory Encoding (much higher than the female audience’s response) only falling at a conceptual closure moment. Conceptual Closure occurs around the 125 second mark, as the song changes pace and seems to finish before continuing. However, memory encoding is retriggered when the camera keeps moving and we see the final women, the young Cancer survivor. At this point, Memory Encoding is very strong, but as the camera zooms out to reveal the women’s scars, Memory levels drop again, as does Engagement and emotional intensity (not shown here). This segment is also associated with a withdraw response and suggests that the males are more likely to find this a confronting image. As the left hemisphere ‘detail memory’, is low and dropping during appearance of the last woman, the superimposed text, ‘Touch yourself’ and ‘A breast cancer anthem from Chrissy Amphlett’ is very poorly encoded. The final black screen presenting the branding suffers from Conceptual Closure and the final branding super “ITouchMyself.org” is very poorly encoded.
In general terms of the ad, men had a strong global bias towards the ad, meaning that they were processing the mood and the soundtrack of the ad, more than the actual details. Women on the other hand, had more of a neutral bias, taking in the details as well.
Overall, I Touch Myself by The Cancer Council is a stunning piece of art work and, while they might not get their brand across to their target market, it certainly gets the message across. The key message ‘I touch myself’ is powerfully integrated in the lyrics and strongly encoded by the women (the target market), as well as to the men.
We've also looked Volvo's Jean-Claud Van Damme fuelled Epic Split, the Harvey Nichols' 'Sorry I Spent it on Myself' ad, and Lurpak's Creative Effectiveness Lion winning Weave Your Magic ad.
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