Friday 5 December 2008

Attention and Emotion




In a presentation "HOW DO WE PREDICT ATTENTION AND ENGAGEMENT?"
Robert Heath quotes Du Plessis as saying ‘…there is little doubt ad-liking has an effect on the ability of a commercial to get attention…’
And quotes Page: ‘… we pay more attention to emotionally powerful events’
He dismisses these, saying Du Plessis and Page's error was to "Assume SYSTEMATIC & GOAL-DRIVEN TV processing"; while "in real viewing situations processing is AUTOMATIC & STIMULUS-DRIVEN".
Actually, Heath's error is to pretend that Du Plessis and Page were theorising. Instead, both were reporting patterns in different data sets.
Page was reporting on 150 US ads, which were split into three groups based on their ability to generate an emotional response among viewers. This was then related to the average level of involvement these ads generated, as measured on Link.







Du Plessis was reporting on analysis of 11400 South African ads; pre-testing had measured ad likability, while tracking had measured recall of the ads, three weeks after they went on air.





Because it completely contradicts his theries, Heath has to ignore this data, so he can rely on claiming that any assertion that emotional content relates to higher attention is just an untested supposition, hence his quotes:
"a link between emotion and attention is also a popular belief."
"Ray & Batra (1983) speculate that ‘People may pay more attention to affective advertising’
"The main task of creativity is generally believed to be to get people to pay attention"

No comments: