The neuroscience of Cannes 2016: Deng Adut, emotion and storytelling

By Neuro Insight director of sales and marketing, Peter Pynta | 11 July 2016
 

AdNews has partnered with Neuro-Insight to bring an analysis of some of this year's winning Cannes work to understand what it is that made them successful through a neuroscience lens.

Emotion and storytelling - Not a day goes by where we don’t hear about their importance in advertising. So what can the brain tell us about these two fundamental aspects of communication? More importantly, what would a marketer do with this knowledge? The award winning Deng Adut story provides a window into these two powerful forces of communication.

Deng Adut | An Emotional Australian Story

Western Sydney University developed a powerful story around Deng Adut – a refugee who came to Australia and is now a practising lawyer who is fighting for others. Finch, VCD and We.Collective won a Silver Lion in the Film category at Cannes this year with this moving story. Our analysis of this 90-second piece of creative provides a unique insight into how the brain responds to stories and why it’s the one proven technique that connects brands with consumers.

What we know about the brain is that it processes information in ‘chunks’. It’s highly selective & determines what is relevant before storing experiences or stories into Long Term Memory. The architecture of a story supports this process of memory storage in very important ways. It also confirms why not all moments are created equal.

Stories usually also contain chapters and the Deng Adut story essentially has two parts:

1) The Sudanese Chapter, &
2) The Australian Chapter.

The analysis of brain activity – see video below – highlights what happens through these chapters.

Conceptual closure in storytelling

When chapters in a story come to a close – as highlighted by symbolic markers’ at the conclusion – we see a processing pattern known as ‘Neuro Conceptual Closure’. Conceptual closure can occur upon the conclusion of a plot / storyline, at which time the concept becomes apparent to viewers. This can trigger a short “processing pause”, where Long Term Memory Encoding (which is directly linked to advertising effectiveness) can be significantly reduced.

This is the fundamental reason why people often say…”it was a great ad, but who was it for?” This is because Conceptual Closure has occurred through specific branding moments.

With Conceptual Closure in mind, if we were looking at this execution from an advertising effectiveness standpoint, it generally means two things:

1. Confirmation that what was encoded previously has been successful, but

2. Anything that is communicated during this short pause in processing (between chapters) means the effectiveness is significantly reduced.

Note: The Cannes Effectiveness winners never suffer from Conceptual Closure during messaging and branding. See the Long View on Cannes Effectiveness here.

The graphic below highlights the jet taking off. We can clearly see how this symbolically meant ‘leaving Sudan behind’ and the chapter comes to a close. The red/blue chart is Memory Encoding (the higher, the more effective), whereas the green chart is Approach / Withdraw (the direction of the emotional response eg. Positive / Negative).

So what? In this case, the text on screen which communicates “The UN got him out” and “Western Sydney took him in” wouldn’t have been as effective as some of the other message points during the stronger moments of storytelling. From an emotional standpoint however, we can see this ‘take-off’ moment being associated with a very strong Approach response (the green chart). The take-off moment elicits a very strong positive emotion – albeit, relativity ineffective.

image 1

Finally, we see Deng Adut quietly celebrating a personal win in the court room – which incidentally is one of the strongest peaks in effectiveness (top 12% on our effectiveness benchmarks). Shortly after, he envisions his mother back in Sudan – which is a very powerful moment (highlighted in the graphic below).

image2

This is a very effective moment. It also drives a very dramatic Withdraw response (green chart), most likely associated with the sadness of his mum’s plight. This sequence also forms another concluding ‘event marker’ in the storytelling, and we see memory encoding falling immediately after this scene….again, confirmation of the success of the previous chapter and marking the end of the story.

A powerful mix of emotional storytelling

The combination of Memory Encoding & Approach / Withdraw in the Deng Adut story highlights how effectiveness and emotion can be woven together in the fabric of creativity and storytelling. Effectiveness and emotional direction are very independent constructs…which also means we don’t have to ‘like’ a moment, for it to be effective.

How we do it?

To investigate these award winners, Neuro-Insight measured brain activity to see how 50 females and 50 males respond to the ad. The specific technology used by Neuro-Insight is founded in work originally developed for academic and neuroscience research, and has been used to analyse the effectiveness of Cannes award winners for over five years.

The technology allows us to simultaneously record viewer’s second-by-second changes in approach (like)/withdraw (dislike), emotional intensity, engagement and memory whilst watching advertisements. The measure Neuro-Insight predominantly focus on based on its strong and highly researched link in influencing consumer behaviours is Long-term Memory Encoding.

This measure reveals what the brain is storing (or encoding) into conscious and unconscious long-term memory. Neuro-Insight’s Memory Encoding graph reveals how elements of the ad are stored in long-term memory. The higher the graph, the more strongly that moment in the ad is stored in memory and the more likely it will influence consumer behaviour.

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