Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Neurology in Marketing: The Art of Human Understanding with The Science of Execution

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with Samrat Saran, Head of Client Solutions at Neuro-Insight, discusses how to optimize the creative when telling your brand's story. Samrat and ...Ryan both agree that marketers should represent the consumer first, then the branding and creativity will follow.These are the topics in today's episode:Branding with understanding (data, your customers, etc.).How to keep the narrative on social media fresh.The most effective ways to leverage branding.Dissecting a brand's social media presence (on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube).Keep up with neurology in marketing by following Neuro-Insights here!If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love our podcast, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @ryanalford | If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:05 You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It's Ryan Alford, your host. And we're here in the lovely Greenville, South Carolina Studios. The Radcast Home, which is Radical, the Raddest, baddest, coolest marketing agency on the planet.
Starting point is 00:00:33 Just saying that, just in case you didn't know. So I'm here. with Samrat, Sanran, again, head of client solutions at Neuro Insight, and we're going to break down Neuro in marketing. And if you're going, what is neuro? Well, you're about to get brainy, my friend. Samrat, what's up, my man? How's it going, Ryan?
Starting point is 00:00:50 It's great to be back. Hey, man. It's, uh, I really enjoyed our TikTok discussion, and I'm, I'm stoked to kind of get into some, uh, the, the impact of the brain in marketing and maybe even more broadly than that, just some, some ways that brands should be thinking about content creation and branding across the ecosystem of social media and the like. So I'm stoked to have you on, man. Absolutely. My pleasure. We've always thought that the decisions we make in life are conscious. Like from the moment we wake up and we say, I want to have a cup of coffee to what we're going to have for lunch.
Starting point is 00:01:36 to how we're going to celebrate the afternoon. But the truth is, 90% of our decision-making is happening in our subconscious. And our subconscious is that metacomputer behind our brain that is constantly processing every piece of information you're getting. Something as small as a little watermarked logo, a piece of paper that you get in direct mail, to all the ads that you're seeing that you don't even realize that you remember. And the subconscious is taking that information, filtering it down, saying, all right, this feels good, this feels engaging, this we should pay a little bit more attention to. And that then gets transferred over to the conscious brain when the time to make a decision comes up. So when you ask somebody, hey, what are you going to have for dinner?
Starting point is 00:02:25 And they are like, oh, I don't know. I'll see what I'm in the mood for. What they're basically saying is my subconscious is still trying to figure out. what we feel as an individual we want to do and what we're hearing right now that will make me will get me in the more then when i tell you that i'm going to have pizza today i'm going to rationalize it with well yeah because pizza is my favorite food it's been a long day i just want something easy and the rationalization process starts are we talking about the voices in my head are we talking about marketing i don't know sir uh...
Starting point is 00:03:01 The voices in your head are the impact of multiple subconscious going on. Oh, man. It's getting scary already. But that's what neuro does is we try to understand the subconscious of the brain and how that is trying to understand the world. And from a marketer's perspective, that is, in essence, what you are trying to communicate with. And for the longest time, we've always taught about it as let me give you a rational argument, or let me give you a lifestyle-based argument, and hopefully you'll consider me. But it's not the same.
Starting point is 00:03:44 And especially now, with things completely fragmenting, our world is no longer the pyramid world of marketing, where it was I start at the apex with TV advertising and then I broadcast across channels. it's an ecosystem style marketing now where everything feeds everything else. And in that world, the subconscious is more pressured to make decisions faster. And then the stories that are the simplest, that are the most engaging, that they're the most touching and the most relevant, those are the stories that win. And for brands, that is what you're trying to get to. And that's where we come in.
Starting point is 00:04:24 Yeah. And historically, you know, I have sat through in a, in a, I called a separate life, but having been in this game for 20 years and in living in the rat race that is New York City, where I know that's home in some part for you, is I have sat through more focus groups than I care to admit for a number of brands. As we, as you just described, you try to ask people, you know, what they think about. an ad or an advertisement in a rational way. You framed it up perfect. So you asked people, hey, we're going to show you five ads and, you know, we want you to get your natural reactions to them. And it's always felt a bit flawed. You know, I felt like depending on the client that we were working with, we could work the room whichever way we wanted, you know, what concept do we really want to sell in here? I could almost tell what was going to happen
Starting point is 00:05:24 it happened, go figure. But again, asking people what they think about an ad in the moment with no other variables, no other metrics involved, always felt very flawed. And you are right, because I would be
Starting point is 00:05:42 sitting as your opponent in that same room coming in from the insights world, where I worked for Pepsi and Anizer Bush, being like, I'm looking at these concepts, I think some of them have potential. Some of them are more important for business reasons. And I know some are the things that the creatives love. And if I have six people come into the room every single time, the creatives are
Starting point is 00:06:08 going to go for the one or two comments that two people have made. The business folks are going to come in for the two comments that people are making. And then as an insights person, you're trying to figure out what all these six are saying. But when I go to a barber and I say, you know, I say, you're trying to say, hey, listen, what do you think about this hairstyle? And will it suit me? Well, one, it won't suit me because I don't have much hair left. But the barber or the hairstylist can tell you exactly, you know, based on the texture of your hair, based on their own skill set, how that's going to work.
Starting point is 00:06:43 If a focus group was conducted with creatives or with business people and you were asking them for their opinion, I think the focus group would work great. because these are people that are trained to think holistically about the solution. When you're talking to somebody who isn't trained in this field, you are putting too much pressure on them to be able to articulate what they're feeling and then rationalizing that with cause. And in certain things like when you're doing behavioral studies where you're like, hey, what do you do every day?
Starting point is 00:07:19 And they're like, well, you know, this is my routine. these are the brands I like. This is why I started to choose them. That part makes sense because they have built habits. They're the experts in themselves. But when you're trying to understand true consumer reaction, you need to go into the subconscious and you need to understand what's happening within the subconscious.
Starting point is 00:07:38 And we talked about this. The processes are pretty much the same platform to platform. Whether you're talking about TV, you're talking about radio, out of home, or social media platforms like TikTok. we first have a reaction on, hey, do I like this? And that's your approach, withdrawal response taking place of do I want to lean in and listen more? It is something that we measure. Then it goes over to engage.
Starting point is 00:08:09 Dema, what am I hearing? Is that actually relevant to me? That is also a part of your brain. In fact, we have seen studies where if you're walking down the street and you see some, a face that you recognize in New York City out of the millions, the engagement part of the brain kicks in saying, hey, I think we recognize them. We should pay a little bit more attention.
Starting point is 00:08:30 You then sense of a feeling of emotion. And all of that, then depending on the way the story was told, will get into memory. Now you can either have the narrative of the story go into memory where you're like, oh, wow, that was a great story. I loved it. I just wish what I knew what brand it was for, which means the narrative went through. Or you can have a story that just gets the brand through.
Starting point is 00:09:00 Yeah, I remember, you know, I remember this Doritos commercial. It was really funny on Super Bowl. Or you can have a story that breaks through both on narrative and on branding. And when you have that, whether it's on TV, on radio, on out of home, anywhere, that's when you've created a moment of connection. And you can only see that when you're studying all those neural patterns that we study. And over the course of the years that we've been doing this, we've studied over 30,000 ads across platforms. We have seen that most brands, even now, are more focused on the brand part of it, which is I just want my brand to get through.
Starting point is 00:09:44 The creatives are always focused on the narrative side of things. And you're hoping this fight will get the story to become better. But most often than not, it actually ends up tilting one way or the other. And I'm sure you have great stories on this as well. Oh, my God. You know, I can, I'm remembering, I mean, you know, it happens daily, but how do we get our logo in there more? You know, like that, that statement alone, I'm not going to name like the name, but I remember a certain client when I was in the middle of my career. I'm still in the middle of my career, but in the early middle of my career, and it's ingrained in my head,
Starting point is 00:10:24 like, we need the logo bigger. We need the logo bigger. And, you know, like when it was a TV spot, you know, can we get the branding, you know, showing a little bit sooner? It's the age all fight, you know, and creative rights, you know, a nice spot. And you spend, you know, and that's the first, you know, a couple weeks. This is back in the old day. We move a lot quicker now. But first, you know, you write the spot. It's a really good spot. The client sees it. Then you spend four weeks back and forth in how much brand we can get into it.
Starting point is 00:10:59 And what the client never completely grasps. And, you know, there's always, it's not that there's a right and a wrong here and coming from the agency perspective. But it's more the agency, I think, the good agencies and myself, I like to, I want to put us in this camp. We're not representing ourselves. We're representing the consumer for you. And when you put the consumer first, then everything comes together. And what the brands do is they think about themselves first. And look, they're trying to sell.
Starting point is 00:11:32 Everyone's got pressure. You've got marketing department and marketing spend. And they've got the CMOs, the fastest guy fired at every organization. Like, I get it. But what they don't understand, though, is the consumer perspective is always the best perspective. And if they aren't getting the story, they don't care about the brand can come through. And, you know, our Cadbury story that we talked about in the last episode is point blank. You know, guerrilla playing in the air tonight, you know, on the drums, as nothing to a Cadbury.
Starting point is 00:12:04 The light brand mentioned at the end. And we see that that's the highest scoring ad in like the history of your study. And you're making the right point. it is not about branding frequently. It is about branding at the right moment. It is the same way that you come into a room and you announce yourself to a group of strangers. And you're like, hi, I am Joe,
Starting point is 00:12:32 and I am the greatest solution to all your problems. How many people will want to pay attention? Everyone. Right? But if Joe comes in and says, hey, guys, how's it going? let me tell you a really interesting story. You know, I was walking the other day,
Starting point is 00:12:49 and I happened to meet this really interesting person who gave me this really interesting story, and these are all the interesting facts about it. Oh, by the way, I'm Joe, and this is what I do. This is how I ran into it. I still made the introduction of who I am, but the interweaving of the narrative as to why I'm at the party
Starting point is 00:13:07 starts to make it much more interesting. The challenge I think with creatives is also struggling to how do you keep narrative fresh? Because the one thing about the subconscious is it doesn't like repetition. If I have seen a story one way and I continue to see the same format happening,
Starting point is 00:13:30 I just start to turn off. That's why when they did Cadbury's the second time with other characters, it never worked. And in this challenge with creatives, sometimes they push too far. And that has another impact on the advertisement. So when we come in, we actually, our process is very different. So depending on platform, depending on the kind of story you want to tell, whether it's an equity story or whether it's a true product story, we actually sit down with the creatives first.
Starting point is 00:14:10 And we say, give us your vision. What do you want to make people feel? and from there we actually help craft the story with them. So we think of ourselves not as market researchers, but as co-editors in the process. Some creatives love us for this. Some creatives are like, you're stepping on our toes. Get out of our sandbox.
Starting point is 00:14:34 Get out of our sandbox. What we say is, listen, we can't come up with a creative solution, but we can tell you where your vision's falling short in execution. And that I think is the place where neural actually comes in. It helps combine the art of human understanding with the science of execution. And that has been that missing link within the industry. And you probably have seen this as well. The same thing that works on TV, that 30 seconds doesn't work on YouTube,
Starting point is 00:15:09 the 15 second doesn't work on any other platform. and you kind of just convert that into audio and play it on radio. Each story, each format is different. There was like a violin playing, and it was soft music to my ears. As you said that, I just came out of a meeting and like, you know, this is part of my daily sales pitch is what we do at Radical
Starting point is 00:15:35 is blend the art and the science. Because what's happened in the industry is a lot of digital. Digital agencies especially have gotten lost in the source of data and data and targeting and all this. We'll get to the creative and the story. And that's just flawed thinking. Great advertising and marketing is the blend of the art and the science. And it's a lost art especially is the creative storytelling side and it's so important still.
Starting point is 00:16:10 And you have to think about the story. in chapters. There are stories that you tell, like, you will tell a part of the story on a particular medium. The rest of the story happens in the other mediums. And when people see the whole story, they're like, wow, I completely get it. That's right. Now, each story has to, each chapter has to stand on its own merits. That's important. But you cannot expect a chapter to deliver the full book. And that's where clients get stuck because they think they got to say it all, and they got to say it all the same way.
Starting point is 00:16:50 You know, they're so used to cramming the 30-second spot that says it all, maybe if it's, you know, they try to, and then you lose the story. And then they want to jam that into the Facebook video, you know? And listen, I think it worked in the 1960s when there were three channels, right? and people would watch the same ads basically on repetition. And probably worked all the way up to the 90s as well. And it probably worked better in the 90s when there were 200 channels. That's right.
Starting point is 00:17:20 But now that's not the case because now there's not 200. You're talking about 20 million. From what you're seeing on buses with the banner ads over there to what you see on billboards, to what you hear on radio for even a few minutes. And you cannot communicate everything. And there's a philosophy that we have, that we have actually seen work a lot for our clients, which is called the theory of iconic triggers. Here's a question for you, Ryan.
Starting point is 00:17:53 What is your most, if I ask you to think about Lion King the movie, what's the first scene that comes into your head? The father, I remember, I forget the names, but I guess the father dying or something and Simba, I don't know. That or the fight between the brothers. All right. But now when you start to think about that scene, the movie is fully coming into your head. Yes. You're starting to picture the scenes before and after.
Starting point is 00:18:26 Yeah. If I, and that is what you call an iconic moment of a scene, of a movie, or an iconic moment of any story. Same thing happens when we read books. We don't remember right from the beginning all the way, to the end. We might remember the book cover. We might remember a certain character. We might remember a certain scene. That is how the brainstores information. So our subconscious creates these little mini hooks. And from those hooks, the rest of the narrative gets built. If you actually thought
Starting point is 00:18:55 of your advertising the same way, create mini hooks that complete the story. But that mini hook is what's common across. It is not the full story that's common. And the way we get to those moments is when we're studying TV advertising or when we're studying radio or when we're studying out of home or actually even digital. We are looking for those most iconic moments of the ad where all the parts of the subconscious and this is the subconscious not what the eyes are looking at or what the face is expressing or what your sweat glands are sweating more. It's not biometrics. This is your true subconscious and we're the ones we're the only ones who can do it. when you create a scene that is so iconic that this is what people will most likely remember about your ad,
Starting point is 00:19:46 we then say this is your hook now. Now use this hook to complete the stories across all the other channels. What that does is if you see it for the first time on digital, you'll see that hook. Now, if you happen to see it on TV, all of a sudden that memory is created even stronger, you see it out of home. Again, the memory is created even stronger. And with a small marketing budget, you have effectively increased your ROI. And you've told a great narrative.
Starting point is 00:20:18 And you've made great branding. And these are the ways that you make great marketing happen. It is not when you try and push your logo everywhere. Well, you've got to entertain on some level and or create a moment. that's entertaining. And, you know, it's interesting when I think about the iconic hooks, you know, I'm going to ask a couple questions myself. So would you consider, so I think of, and we're talking and trying to help, you know,
Starting point is 00:20:49 small to be in businesses, you know, narrow down on these things. But I'm going to talk about a big business here for a second. Is the iconic hook for a campaign like progressive? Is it flow? Is she the iconic hook or is just the comedic part of each other? one of those spots? So that is a great question because an iconic
Starting point is 00:21:12 trigger moment could be one of many things. It could be a specific audio cue. It could be a visual face to the brand. It could be the
Starting point is 00:21:27 specific climax of a story. Or it could even be the introduction sequence. And that's the beauty of the subconscious, is that it will, anything can be an iconic moment when it is executed correctly. With flow, for example, in Progressive, she became an iconic moment. Right. She became a symbol.
Starting point is 00:21:53 And then her in the comedic positions became those iconic triggers. But when Flo first came on, when the Verizon guy first came on, when, uh, when, uh, the gecko first came on. They were just characters. Yep. And this is also a part of storytelling that I think small and medium business could probably benefit a lot from is do not try to make a campaign for a year with just the idea of I'm going to sell.
Starting point is 00:22:25 Because you're always going to be in that fight. And marketing and sales have to be thought about differently. Sales is the art of selling marketing is the art of storytelling. to enable sales. If I had my sound board right now and I had an amen key, amen. You know, like, I don't know how much time you spent in the church in the church pew, but I grew up in the South and the Southern Baptist and there'd be, you know, the deacons would be, amen, when the pastor would say something good.
Starting point is 00:22:53 Amen. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. That's, uh, you just said it. So yes, I would have given you a hallelujah and an amen on all of that. You don't know how many times I have. have to convince client even today that sales and marketing are separate. And unfortunately, when you confuse that you don't do justice to both.
Starting point is 00:23:14 And there is a part of marketing that lives within sales that happens at the point of selling and point of buying. But the art of storytelling is not the same. And I have found many examples. And this is not just, you know, it's small and medium businesses, which sometimes I feel are actually much better at sales-driven marketing at the point of buying and selling. But in larger companies, where marketers also confuse that when you get into a store, that you should not be doing the same equity-based marketing that you're doing on TV or on a
Starting point is 00:23:52 broadcast media or on social media. And I think the tension is real because it's happening on both sides, not just from one department. That's right. I see it all the time. So how many times a week you have to explain the difference between neuro and other forms of research? Probably three times a day. My doctors recommend it to do it less. I think neuro marketing, from what I first remember, I was driving back home from the office
Starting point is 00:24:33 and there was a show on the radio talking about neuromarketing. And this was about 10 or 12 years ago. And things have picked up dramatically since then, from people not understanding the concept of neuromarketing to now everyone claiming that they do neuromarketing. I've had people come up and pitch to me while I was at Anizer Bush and at Pepsi where, well, we study micro expressions on the face as qualitative, focus group moderators, and that's a form of neural marketing.
Starting point is 00:25:10 We'd study eye tracking, and that's a form of neuromarketing. No, it's not because you're just seeing where the eye is going. Yeah, that's the conscious. That's not the subconscious. Exactly. And just because, so here is a fantastic way of explaining eye tracking to you. Let me give you an encyclopedia, and let me ask you to go through a page. Everything that you have seen on a page, where there's the picture, the words,
Starting point is 00:25:36 Does that mean now that it's imprinted in the subconscious brand? No, all it says is where my eyes are going. Those are great for diagnosing when you're doing, you know, packaging design or when you're doing something that is related to navigation cues. Yeah, website, UI, all that kind of stuff. So those, it helps you figure out the paths. But beyond that, if you try and use it further in trying to create behavior, It doesn't work.
Starting point is 00:26:08 People then talk about running instrumentation that will, you know, study your heart rate and your sweat glands and they call it galvanic skin response. It is basically a measure of your, at best arousal. So when you're watching a movie and, you know, it's a horror film and you want to hear something about that, fine, those things could work. But when you're trying to create advertising, when there is a particular point to this store, those systems don't work. And trying to explain to clients that just because somebody claims it's neural doesn't make it neural. The same way, just because somebody says that they, you know, understand a little bit of science, doesn't make them a doctor.
Starting point is 00:26:57 you should be actually asking the question, do you really study the subconscious or do you study some other part of it? And some measurement of a physical reaction that might be happening. Because how you react to something physically versus what you're thinking are many times not exactly the same. Yes. And so when you're working with clients, You know, when I think about, you know, what you guys do and evaluating, especially when we think back to some of the, you know, TikTok work and the Super Bowl work and some of those things, I think about you guys evaluating and help, you know, you put the brain pads on, you're evaluating the subconscious to give people feedback on those things. But are there, are there like, you know, you guys have been doing this a long time.
Starting point is 00:27:52 You're the experts in the field. are there, and I know you did this with some of the TikTok studying things like that, but like are there takeaways that then you guys bundle for clients in helping them holistically improve their marketing and creative outputs? You know, are they like, I know every campaign is different. So you've got, you know, you got a writer and an art director, you know, working on a campaign and putting it together and it's specific to a product or service. but are there, you know, call it, you know, four keys, five keys, two keys.
Starting point is 00:28:29 Are there things that you universally kind of recommend to companies or agencies or otherwise in that process? Yeah. So what we do is, first and foremost, we make sure that your branding comes through. And branding doesn't mean that you slap the logo on the whole time. We are specifically looking for your most dominant branding moment. And have you told a story that actually gets it to that point where people are like, I'm interested in knowing what this brand is? And that is the core focus of what we say as a marketer you should be focused on.
Starting point is 00:29:14 Otherwise, what you'll end up doing is you'll create a narrative that nobody cares about and you've just lost marketing dollars. or you're creating a narrative that will benefit the category, but not you. Because you might create a great ad for insurance, but I don't know what brand created that narrative. And now I'm just going online and I'm looking at different insurance companies. So you just advertised for the art category. Oh, you just struck another nerve in me. I remember I used to do BDI, CDI studies.
Starting point is 00:29:51 Remember those terms? Oh, yeah. So category development and brand development. And sometimes, you know, like for a startup, there's no category awareness. And so you have to elevate the whole category. But when it's very established, like I remember in the days of wireless, you know, like I was doing wireless in 2001. And we had to do some category development because, you know, other than people that were working that had bag phones, you know, because they had to be mobile and they were aware of it, there was not universal awareness of cell phone, the category itself. And so Verizon Wireless spent millions of dollars in category development, even though there were other players coming in, but they had to do it. And, you know, how much was spent on category versus brand. We did all these BDI, CDI studies. And, you know, in a new business, when Uber came around, they had to elevate the category,
Starting point is 00:30:51 right? because it didn't exist. And so anyway. And the question then becomes like, what is right share? How does this work? Like you have those category questions. And there is a time for that. But in an established category, it's about differentiation.
Starting point is 00:31:05 And you have to be able to bring your brand out. So that's the first thing. And there are many, many principles to what makes good branding. And some of them, I think Tyler's talking, talked about. about and we just published in the frontiers of neuroscience a phenomenon that happens, which is called conceptual closure. Conceptual closure, correct? Exactly.
Starting point is 00:31:34 Yep. And conceptual closure basically means that you have told a story. The brain thinks now that the story has come to an end. And it takes a couple of seconds to sit and process everything that it's heard, starting to filter out what it wants, what it doesn't want. and during those two seconds, you've shown brand. So the two seconds in the ad, when you're basically given the brain a pause,
Starting point is 00:32:01 is when you showed branding. And a lot of people do this. It starts with FIT to Black, slow down the music, show people going away into the horizon, things that were like, oh, we're completing the story. No, you're not completing the story.
Starting point is 00:32:18 You're ending the story. And to date, this is 10 years we've been watching this happen. And for the last 10 years, that was the biggest principle that we were talking about was avoid this. And there are techniques to how you avoid conceptual closure. There are techniques to how you make sure that conceptual closure doesn't impact branding because it's normal for the brain to take mini breaks and process information. And there are techniques that we have where even if conceptual closure is happening, we can try and mitigate the response on branding. So that's the most fundamental and basic way that we protect ROI for brands.
Starting point is 00:33:05 And try to still preserve narrative. And for us, the narrative integrity and the creative's vision is very important. So once we have branding, now we start the second principle is on the creative vision. How do we tell the story the way the creative wants to tell it? And sometimes it is small scenes. A simple scene can change and make a huge difference in the way an ad performs. And we actually have seen this time and again where a wrong pause, a wrong look, had changed how people perceive the brand.
Starting point is 00:33:48 We don't, and the idea is how do you create a great ad with minimal changes to an ad? So that's the second principle we have. And then the third one is when we are in the storyboard or animatic phase, depending on platform, we actually guide creatives on, if you're, screen time, makes a huge difference on the way you process information. If I were to give you a 10-point email on a laptop, you're going to actually read and remember things differently than if I gave you a 10-point email and ask you to read it on your phone.
Starting point is 00:34:28 Because the parts of your subconscious that actually get engaged, depending on screen type, are different. So storytelling has to be different. And we work with creatives and brand teams to basically, basically fine-tune the ideas in the development phase against screen types. So those are principles that we have. And, you know, no story is the same. No idea can be replicated identically.
Starting point is 00:34:58 And brand and narrative have a huge impact on the execution. So to back up one second. So creative closure, I'm backing up to create. Was it? Conceptual closure. Creative closure. Concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, concept, conceptual closure. We're trying to avoid that. Am I hearing you correctly? Because we don't want people thinking the story's over. I mean, help me, I think I understand it, but it helped me help explain on layman's terms, like the, the reason we're trying to avoid that for, when we're doing marketing and advertising. So we don't, we're not trying to avoid it. We're trying to avoid it before branding.
Starting point is 00:35:44 Before the branding. I got it. So thus, the story ends. Okay, now I'm with you. So we just told a funny or sad or interesting story in whatever format. And then we fade to black and show the logo. So it's, it's then you're kind of shutting off instead of being included in the message. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:36:08 And that's the most basic way. Because think about movies. You watch a movie. It fades to black screen credits come on. What do you do? You leave the screen. Yeah, no one watches the credits. Unless you did something like, well, Marvel did,
Starting point is 00:36:18 and said, oh, by the way, there is a scene at the end that you need to wait and watch. Yes, yes. I love that. People wait at five, six minutes. And, I mean, that is, I think that is a magic of storytelling. Like, you create these nuance. And that's the best part about conceptual closure is, you think you've solved for conceptual closure
Starting point is 00:36:42 because you've done it a few times. But because advertising changes at such a rapid pace, what was causing conceptual closure and we're creatures of habit. So what was causing conceptual closure in the past couple of years because of a learned habit actually has now changed. So what we saw
Starting point is 00:37:07 with ads was there were ads when, you know, you would fade to black and it won't work. But then people started to change to fate to reds or fate to whites and they stopped working. Then they started to do things where, all right, let me just start the ad with my brand. And let me just avoid this whole issue of conceptual closure. But you give away your brand too early and all of the first. a sudden people are like, I'm not interested. So these, the subconscious
Starting point is 00:37:44 adapt so quickly. The theories are there. We just have to keep watching on how people change their responses. I love it, man. I think we could talk all day about this. It is
Starting point is 00:38:01 a deep thing to mind. Yes. No kidding. Especially my wife's. I just don't want her to feel left out. Yes, I know. I'm going to get some brain pads so I can hook them up to my wife and know what she's thinking at any moment. We haven't gotten all there yet. We just stop at how people are reacting.
Starting point is 00:38:30 We don't try to go further into what they're actually thinking. Damn it. All right. I love it, man. There's a lot of good stuff here. I know we're going to continue these conversations. We could go on and on. A lot of insight here for brands and marketers that are thinking about the outputs they put on different channels, the important of context for those things, the different screens, the impact.
Starting point is 00:38:57 That was really enlightening to me thinking about it that way. And hell, even within the screens, you've got vertical and horizontal. There's just, there's so many layers to this. But so I'm right. I really appreciate you coming on again and sharing your insight. and telling us even more about the brain and how scary it is. It is a wonderful place where the greatest stories and the most amazing inspiration comes from. I think the more we can talk about it and learn from it, the more we will inspire ourselves.
Starting point is 00:39:24 Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, where can everybody keep up with you again? Let's drop just some of any of that info. So anyone that may not have heard our last episode can know where to find you and everything, Neuro Insights. Yeah, so you can absolutely come to our website. It's neurodash insight.com or you can search me on LinkedIn. I keep regularly posting new content there.
Starting point is 00:39:48 And yeah, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Great. Well, we really appreciate someone coming on and our great partnership with Neuro Insights. They are the go-to for the real, the greatest and the best in neuro and brain and all that stuff. They are doing some cutting-edge things and we're so excited to be partnering and having them on and them just sharing so much knowledge with all of our listeners. Well, you know where to find us. We're at the.radd.cast on Instagram, the radcast.com.
Starting point is 00:40:16 We've got a new website launching here in the next few days. You're going to be able to find all of our content. You can search for anything, any topic that you want. You can search for Nero. You'll find all of our great episodes with Nuroinside. You can search for Instagram, anything, and everything. We spend a lot of time on really aggregating all of the content we've brought to life on the Radcast.
Starting point is 00:40:36 So be on the lookout for that. You know where to find me on Instagram. I'm at Ryan Alford on all the platforms. And we'll see you next time. Yo, guys, what's up, Ryan Alford here? Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. But do us a favor.
Starting point is 00:40:48 If you've been enjoying the radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We really appreciate it. And go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid. Tell more people. Leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me directly, you want to get your business kicking ass.
Starting point is 00:41:07 and you want radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at 864, 7293680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864, 7293680. We'll see you next time.

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