For the nineth year running, Neuro-Insight has teamed up with AdNews to unlock the brain’s take on creativity, by taking a deeper look at some of the Cannes award winners from this year. The Nike ‘Dream Crazy’ ad won an impressive 27 awards across multiple categories. It’s a brilliant piece of creative that takes controversial people and themes head on….to great effect.
Neuro-Insight measured and analysed brain activity to see how female and male viewers responded to this ad. The specific technology used by Neuro-Insight is founded in work originally developed for academic and neuroscience research and has been previously used to analyse the effectiveness of Cannes award winners for over eight years in partnership with AdNews.
Our Approach
Neuro-Insight 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 focuses on, is Long-term Memory Encoding. It’s a metric which has an extensively researched link in influencing consumer behaviours.
It reveals what the brain is storing (or encoding) into conscious and unconscious long-term memory – pinpointing 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 when it’s successfully linked to branding.
Nike Dream Crazy – No Apologies for the Controversy!
The Dream Crazy ad features just about every race, creed and culture one could imagine. The personalities that feature heavily are also the individuals who have been actively involved in the social and political landscape recently…namely Serena Williams and Colin Kaepernick.
Serena Williams has been associated with outbursts on the Tennis court (The US Open) & Colin Kaepernick received huge attention for kneeling through the US national anthem in protest for black rights.
The Brain Decides Subconsciously
Despite what people might rationally say about the pros and cons of Williams and Kaepernick, the truth about what consumers really think is acceptable, is significantly harder to understand. When the brain responds to storytelling it automatically determines what’s right, relevant or meaningful in the moment. It will let certain moments in and shut others out. This response can be measured, and it can provide certainty. This is in fact, the purest response we can get on an ad and the talent used to support the story – be they polarising or not!
Relevant and Memorable
Two of the most meaningful neuro metrics to use in measuring a consumers’ response to advertising are Engagement (a sense of personal relevance) & Memory Encoding (what the brain determines is worth storing for future reference and to guide future behaviour).
The chart below highlights three of the most powerful moments in the ad. This analysis is based primarily on Females responses (the solid line). The Blue time series trace is Engagement, whereas the Red trace is Memory Encoding. Both measures allow us to quantify the strength of these moments. They have been very successfully communicated with Females, but significantly weaker with Males!
Memory Encoding Video Analysis
There is a very strong correlation between what is stored into memory, and an ads performance in market. This analysis shows how the brain responds to specific moments by measuring the strength with which these themes & moments are stored in Long Term Memory – both consciously & subconsciously.
Being Courageous Pays Off for Nike
There’d be a lot of risk-averse advertisers who wouldn’t use controversial themes or people in their advertising….perhaps being guided by what consumers ‘say’. Perhaps the risk of polarisation is too great. This analysis demonstrates the significant pay-off for Nike during these moments. As the analysis above objectively demonstrates, female consumers responded very strongly to these moments and themes. Most of which also featured Nike branding – which is another big win.
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