Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Understanding the Neurological effect in Super Bowl Ads: How did the Super Bowl Ads Really Play Out?

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

In this bonus episode on The Radcast, Tyler Lewis joins us again to share how the Super Bowl Ads really played out. Did they have a positive impact for the brand? Well, we answer that question and more in this bonus episode.Tyler shares how this how process works, by dissecting how our brain processes what it's seeing, what exactly the ad meter is, and how to understand the memory encoding process.If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love what we discuss, 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 |Follow Tyler Lewis and Neuro-Insight at www.neuro-insight.com | or on Twitter @neuro_insight 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. 

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 rest it is our part two in a two-part series on the impact of Nuro and Super Bowl ads and all things brainy stuff with our very own Tyler Lewis, Director of Client Solutions at NeuroInsight. And I'm just taking the liberty there of calling our very own, I feel like you're a buddy now, Tyler, but he is with NeuroInsight. So great to have you again, Tyler. Hey, happy to be here and happy to be considered part of the family.

You are part of the family, especially having the cooler liquor bar in the background for anyone watching the video. We were talking in the pre-episode about getting up there and sharing a scotch maybe on one of these episodes, so we're going to make that happen when things come to life.

But we also have here with us the creative director at Radical, Mike Weston. Mike, welcome to the show again. Thank you. Good to be here. And Josh. Yeah. Excuse me. Josh. Hello.

Our digital media manager here at Radical, Josh Hill. Good to be here. Even your very own host is allowed to have a hiccup every now and then. You know, increasing 120 shows plus now, even my brain has a freeze every now and then. But Tyler, I'm really looking forward to it. We've been anxious to look at the results from the Super Bowl. We talked last time about the impact of advertising and how we've traditionally viewed quote-un unquote success of,

of ads during the Superbowl and the somewhat arbitrary notion of, you know, ones we like, you don't like the focus groups of one as we like to call it. And then of course the old ad feeder, but we're pretty anxious, man. I know we're not going to give away just yet,

but were you, can you answer this much? Were you surprised by any of the results we're going to give away just yet, but can you answer this much? Were you surprised by any of the results we're going to talk about today? Absolutely. I think one of the things we touched on a little bit last week and that we'll expand upon this week is the fact that the ad meter within the industry, especially in the brand side, is usually the advertiser's Super Bowl rating system, right? They want to know how all of these consumers are rating their ads on a 0 to 10 scale or 1 to 10 scale. And typically what we tend to see is ads that perform high in the ad meter typically don't perform well neurologically. So in terms of my level of surprise, I'm not surprised by what we

see because we see a similar trend this year. And, you know, some of the things that we'll discuss may surprise you guys a little bit more than it surprised me because, you know, we typically are going to be seeing the best performing ads on AdMeter show fairly low memory encoding for the branding and vice versa? Well, that's somewhat surprising, but not surprising. I think it's in the ad world that we live in, we sometimes get in love with our own sauce, so to speak. Myopic. Yeah, myopic. There we go. Mike, I think sometimes we fall in love with our own sauce, so to speak. Is that a fair? Yeah, myopic. There we go. Mike, I think sometimes we fall in love with our own ideas.

Yeah, but what seems funny or interesting or has a celebrity, we think is naturally what's going to stick in the brain and be resonant. But that's not always the case. Exactly. And, you know, the fairly common themes that we tend to see within the Super Bowl is no use of emotion, whether it's comedy, drama, sadness, use of social issues, say things like, especially this year, COVID-19, or political issues that were generally avoided for the most part, the use of animals, comedy, with those animals, use of celebrity, which usually will tend to overshadow the brand itself,

and athletes in general. You know, we saw a lot of these themes come out once again, also the use of nostalgia is a big one that we saw, but you know, a lot of that does tend to overshadow the true brand story, which as we start to take a look at these results, we'll see some of those common Super Bowl themes overshadow the brand response and take away from that memory encoding

and ROI for the brands that invested over $5.5 million in their spots in the Super Bowl this year. So I'll roundtable this one. You know, it's funny how fleeting ads and everything is. You know, we kind of move from one thing to the other really quickly. But for everyone, have you seen, either in just your own periphery,

either through social or through seeing the ads again, or any discussion amongst friends or others, has there been any kind of commentary or overall observation, like post-Super Bowl with these campaigns? Josh, I'll start with you. Yeah, on social media, there's always the day after you're going to see a lot of talk, and then it's gonna trickle out and then you always see like maybe two or three ads actually continue to be talked

about and i saw the the bruce springsteen jeep one kind of like went out it people were talking about it up through like thursday and at least in my feeds on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, but what I'm still seeing today is the ODS. That one, for some reason, I keep seeing people talking about it, mentioning it on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. That's kind of now the only one I see still.

Mike, about you. You know, I haven't had a lot of discussions with people since the day of the big game. It's funny you bring up Bruce because, I don't know, obviously the world knows now that a week before he flew out to BFE or wherever he went to shoot a commercial for Aspen, Kansas, he got pinched for DUI. And that led ultimately, it was almost the excuse for yanking the spot. So he blew.02, which is not...

Is it Bruce? Bruce. He took a little ride up to Sandy Hook, which, Tyler, you know, Sandy Hook is, you can see the city from there. It's a beautiful stretch of beach in New Jersey. It's a federal park. And a park ranger caught him doing a shot of tequila with some fans. It's notable because it was January. He was riding his Harley Triumph.

So I commend him for that. But he blew a.02, which outside of the park is fine, right? But in the park, he got a DUI. And apparently, Chrysler used that opportunity to yank the ad, used that as an excuse to yank the ad, when in point of fact, they were getting a lot of negative reaction. It was a very polarizing ad,

as we can all expect in this time of day. But I thought it was interesting that Chrysler said that's the reason, not because half the country hated the spot, it's because Brooks blew a.02 in a state park, or a federal park. Yeah, I mean, you have to be extremely careful, and you bring that up now. There's a recent campaign that was released by P&G that features Chris Harrison from The Bachelor who recently has had a little bit of a drum in his life too and they had to yank that right away it was ironic the day that that ad was supposed to be released

was the day that he also had some controversy in his life so you know you got to be real careful about those characters as well and he was talking and i'm not going to get into supporting or not him or anything but the irony was just that he was talking about cancel culture and he got canceled and he might he probably very well deserve very ignorant uh comments uh given for his position so i i don't condone anything he did but just the the irony of him talking on canceling, well, you can watch what you say, buddy. Oh, yeah. I hadn't heard the Bruce Springsteen score, though.

The.02. Man. I mean, I might get that with the mouthwash I use. Exactly. If I get pulled over every time I leave the house, I might be in trouble. I mean, if I get pulled over every time, you know, I leave the house, I might be in trouble. I think Josh brought up one key point, too, is in terms of measuring effectiveness of advertisements,

social is also a big signifier. A lot of brands use social as, you know, a signifier of ROI after the Super Bowl, right? a signifier of ROI after the Super Bowl, right? Now, the quote-unquote brand winners of the Super Bowl were one, Mountain Dew, and two, Pepsi, two PepsiCo brands. Well, if you look into it, Mountain Dew had a competition within their ad asking consumers to tweet the number of Mountain Dew cans or bottles they saw within the advertisement, and they had a chance to win a million dollars.

Now the question is, is that a long lasting impact for Mountain Dew, or is that just a flash in the pan? And I think what Josh brings up about Oatly is gonna be something we talk about a little bit later here, about that longevity of emotion, that longevity of driving memory and coding for your brand, that even though this ad, not to give too much away, this Oatly ad was commonly criticized for being the worst creative in the entire Super Bowl, it does have long-lasting power.

Yep. As your host might have suggested last week, I've Been doing this ad business too long. I even know what my brain is not supposed to be thinking is thinking about thinking. You know what's ironic? That spot was created in-house. No agency. It was an old spot too.

About six years old. I didn't know that. I didn't know it was a CEO. Hey, I do want to get into Tyler. Let's talk about transitioning into the neuro side in contrary to AdMeter. How is the success, what's the process, what is the measurement story for you guys

for how all this comes together? Absolutely. Yeah, and we're gonna start at the base here where, you know, much of the brain's processing occurs in the subconscious, right? So, you know, we have about 90% of our processing is going to happen in this unconscious mind that we can't directly pull out after seeing an advertisement or even while we're watching something. You know, the brain is an automatic device that is consistently firing in response to stimuli that you're exposed to, right? The other 10% is conscious processing, which is things that you can measure with recall or things that you can

measure with asking people questions or surveys. Well, we specialize in, and what we do is we measure brain response with a headset that is patented and unique to NeuroInsight that can look at the key or the different parts of the brain that are more or less active on the surface of the brain and correlate that to specific neurometrics that have been identified to be important for understanding how people are actually processing the content that they're exposed to. So we measure a few key metrics that are important for this processing. Everything revolves around what we call memory encoding. Now, memory encoding is a measure of what is actively being laid down into memory.

And memory encoding is broken out into two different parts. One is measured in the left hemisphere of the brain, which is called detail memory encoding. And that's memory encoding for details, call to action, you know, very, very detail oriented things. It's very straightforward. Global memory encoding is more of an emotional memory encoding that allows us to measure how people are responding to big picture themes. And this is measured in the right hemisphere of the brain. So going back to, say, sixth grade neuroscience or sixth grade science, really not neuroscience, understanding left brain versus right brain things, you know, this is what we're measuring here. In addition to that,

we have some diagnostic measures that help us kind of paint the full picture of how people are responding to things that they're watching. Now, we're looking at things like approach withdrawal, which is a positivity or negativity of people are experiencing emotion in the moment which is an understanding of you know or a multiplier for that approach withdrawal response another thing that's fairly important to us is engagement which is a measure of how engaged people are and also how relevant content is to the consumer or to that target demographic and then we have attentional measures, which help us identify how much attention people are paying to the content in real time. Now, all of this is measured on a second by second basis, which allows us to paint a dynamic picture

of how people are responding to that content as they see it. Because if you think about any movie that you've seen or anything that you were exposed to throughout the day, you can't physically or evolutionarily remember every single thing you're exposed to. So this allows us to identify those moments that are going to stick out in users' minds or consumers' minds, and then optimize against those elements to understand whether or not

one branding is going through and then use those key elements to drive branding through to the consumers. So to be clear, we're talking through the lens of Super Bowl ads, but everything you just stated is universal to how you guys measure ads in general, correct? Absolutely. Yep. to how you guys measure ads in general, correct? Absolutely, yep.

And just right over since I asked that question, randomly speaking, you guys have been doing this long enough in comparison. Is there differences in how the brain responds to Super Bowl ads versus any other type of ad or average time period? I see that that would drive some, you know, the semblance of where you are, how you are and how,

how attentive we are to the ads compared to, you know, a typical moment where you're kind of in and out of, I think paying attention to what it is. Absolutely. Absolutely. Context is super important. And I think it all starts with,

you know, first of all looking at the power of the creative and the amount of money that's being invested into Super Bowl advertisements I think Super Bowl ads and just generally Super Bowl ads are just garnering more investment than you know your typical everyday advertisement so there's much higher production quality, which leads to a different type of response to that type of content. For example, if we're watching TV right now, you would see an ad that's probably fairly product focused, doesn't really feature any celebrities,

and is focused on, say, the Tide bottle or whatever method of action or benefit you're gonna get from that product. whereas a super bowl ad is going to feature you know a celebrity director potentially a celebrity in the ad um you know a lot of higher production qualities potentially looks like it's produced by michael bay you know which is going to take away from the product itself so typically what we tend to see is different parts of the brain are going to interact with these different types of advertisements in a way that influences how people are responding.

So we have this thing called, and this theory called, the neurostate theory. And the neurostate theory states that there's a bias, either left or right brain, or there's either a left or right brain bias that influences how people are processing information. The former advertisement that I was describing that's more detail-oriented that is all about the product is likely to drive a left brain bias and is likely to drive a more detail-oriented response in the brain. Whereas

a Super Bowl ad is likely to drive a higher right brain bias because you have all this higher production quality and you have these celebrities or these more creative elements, if you will, that could potentially take away from branding. So it's important to strike a good balance when we're looking at and assessing these Super Bowl ads

to understand, one, at the very base, how people are responding to the creative. And then you mentioned context, right? Within the context of the Super Bowl, most people are involved in the game in a very emotional way. We're talking about maybe fans of the game, fans of the sport, fans of the teams. You're with a bunch of friends. This is the culmination of the most popular sport in the US with 96.1 million viewers this year. So everybody is involved in this. So the context is also going to drive the emotion of the game. And we typically tend to see a higher emotional response to Super Bowl advertisements and the Super Bowl in general when compared to other general.

Then you consider the cultural relevance, right? that is going to impact how people are responding to the content and how people are driving or building their campaigns within which you are placing your advertising campaign. And the next thing is, you know, the campaign itself, you know, you're you have to understand, you know, how you know how to differentiate yourself from the different ads within the space, which is another strong impact on that brand response. So typically we see that Super Bowl ads will be more memorable than most ads in our database, but won't be memorable for the right reasons, right? The more memorable ads that drive branding

are the ones that are gonna be very brand focused. I love it. You know, if you guys were ever going to do a commercial for yourself, and I don't know if that ever makes sense given how niche you are, but I always go back to the this is your brain. Yeah. On drugs. Right.

This is your brain on ads. That's a freebie. You guys can have that. I'm going to use that. That's a freebie. You guys can have that. I'm going to use that. And you need to, you should do like a,

if you were going to do a TikTok video, you would say, you know, but you have to think about what, what would be the analogy of the brain on that? I think it's the egg. Every time I make eggs though. I think it's time to,

to, to remove some of the drama. I'm really ready to get into where we landed. Are we ready to get into it? Sure, absolutely. And I think to kind of start off, what I would like to do is share with you guys an example of how we're talking about how traditional research doesn't specifically line up with neuro research so I'm gonna share with you guys the case study a

quick quick overview of you know an ad we test years ago in one of our validation studies so there was an ad that we tested for the brand Cadbury, which was a UK-based brand at the time, which used a very creative approach to promoting their brand. Now, this ad had the song In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins in the background and had a gorilla featured on the drums that played the drums at the drum solo of In the Air Tonight. Now, I'm assuming most of our millennial plus viewers or listeners know the song In the Air Tonight, where Phil Collins has that big drum solo in the middle.

At that time, the gorilla plays the drums, then Cadbury comes in and shows its branding. Now this advertisement was tested in traditional market research, and what was shown in the traditional research was, focus groups said, when compared to UK TV ad test norms, that this ad was not easy to understand, was not relevant, had a negative correlation on persuasion and how much it tells you about the brand. And furthermore, the director of marketing

at the time was basically told that, quote, you were never showing this ad, but they showed it anyways, right? And I would assume it's probably because CGI gorillas were not cheap at the time, they invested a lot of money into this campaign already. Despite the market research results, they've released it. And what happened in market was dairy milk sales increased by 9% while this ad was in market, despite those results that we just saw. The ad won a Grand Prix Lyon. Reported brand favorability went up by 20% while this ad was in market and the

song this is my favorite stat the song in the air tonight despite not being re-released climbed up to number 14 on the UK singles charts and was number 3 on iTunes and this advertisement is typically highly regarded still to this day as one of the best ads of all time, despite those market research results. So that kind of goes to show one, like, okay, we see this disconnect between, you know, how people are responding to the ad meter and how we drive effectiveness. And this kind of sets it up for the rest of what we're going to talk about as well. So when we focus in on our detailed memory encoding metric, which is our key metric for understanding,

it's our key KPI for understanding whether or not an ad is effective or not, we tend to see a few things when we look at the results for this Cadbury Gorilla ad. What we see is, you know, the brain is trying to process things in real time, specifically looking at these different scenes that may be driving impact. And within the specific ad itself, what we saw using our methodology was, you know, given the brain is trying to pick up on the story, the brain picks up on one, the gorilla, two, the gorilla on the drums playing the drum solo,

and then three, the branding. And this is a very simple advertisement that, again, people did not equate to Cadbury, but drove impact for the brand. And our metric was able to pick that out, specifically showing effectiveness at that branding moment for Cadbury, whereas traditional research was not able to show this, which shows that subconscious is that key driver for impacting sales and market. Did it run the U.S.? Because I remember seeing and reading about it being in the ad game, but I know it was a U.K. campaign, and I remember seeing it as the U.S.

No, it never ran. Maybe because I love the world. I don't know which one it was. I mean, it ran in the show books. That's why we're all familiar with it. The Grula, though, was quite an accomplishment. What's interesting about this creative, and we'll talk about this a little bit more when we get to the Oatly creative, is, you know, there were a lot of knockoffs, right? A lot of people tried to replicate this.

is there were a lot of knockoffs, right? A lot of people tried to replicate this. But once it's done, you can't replicate it, right? People are used to the formula, they get used to the song and dance plus branding, and there tends to be a bunch of knockoffs that just really fail in market. So this was incredible market creativity in itself, because it was able to do so well for the brand.

And really given, you know, the knockoffs or the pretenders that came out can't be replicated unless, you know, it's far enough in the rear view mirror that somebody picks it up again. You know, we had a saying around here came from Bartle, Bogle, Haggerty. I think it was John Bogle,

famous British agnostic. And what he said was, and it's true of the industry, creativity is determined by the obscurity of your sources. You know, so I know we creatives so, so I, and I know,

I know we creatives are notorious for that. And the ad, the ad industry as a whole is kind of the epitome of imitation is a sincerest form of flattery. Right. Right. We still have a 3,400 celebrity commercials on every single ad. Yeah, exactly. Well, also it's a formula. 3,400 celebrity commercials on every Super Bowl ad. Yeah.

Exactly. It's so formula. And also with the same cadence as well. I think that's the thing. There are a lot of Super Bowl ads that came out this year that we'll talk about as well that maybe won the ad meter, but are the same song and dance as we've previously seen. whether it's like, you know, cut scene, like, you know, five jokes, you know, cut scenes between like different situational things and throwing branding, you know, you've already lost people after, you know, and then as we talk about the Amazon ad today as well, you know, Amazon has been very repetitive in their creative structure as well,

which is, again, just featuring a celebrity in these different situations. And you wear out the viewer by the time you get to branding and you can't effectively brand. Well, again, I think we're ready to get in. Let's go. What's our first teed up one as far as how it performed yeah we're gonna start with uh with my favorite

and the winner slash loser of this super bowl uh which is the oatly advertisement so yeah we'll start with the good stuff here so just to kind of teed up this only advertisement was originally shot in 2014 in Sweden it was banned it was banned in Sweden because of some of the dairy farmers it's I forget the exact reason but basically there was some dairy farm legislation that led to the banning of this advertisement because it's all about wow, wow, no cap. So they had this in their back pocket for a while.

And as the Super Bowl was kind of coming up and with ad sales being down for the Super Bowl this year, it seems like they were able to get a discounted spot. We don't know the exact number, but that's the theory behind is they were able to get a discounted spot. We don't know the exact number, but that's the theory behind it, is they were able to get a discounted spot. And they decided without any time to build a new creative, they just re-released this one. And this ad was the lowest performer on the ad meter,

was one of the most talked about ads on social, and as Josh said, is still one of the most talked about ads on social. And Josh, actually, before we even dive into it, we'd love to hear some of your thoughts, and just before we even show the results, we'd love to hear what you guys think of this advertisement overall. I thought it was a great placement being so unique and polarizing to where it's sitting amongst all the other ads during the Super Bowl.

It just stuck out all the more to me. I think that's why people noticed it and hated it so much. But even every time I saw it mentioned, even if someone was hating it, someone would always be replying or tweeting back or commenting and saying, well, I actually loved it. And someone else would be like, why?

This is so stupid. And they would just continue on this long conversation about it. And I saw people changing their mind. But anytime you have a piece of content online that's being interacted with like that, like the algorithm is going to love it. They're going to try to get more people to get interacted, get involved. So they're going to push that to the top. So you can, it kind of almost like, it was like needed to have some kind of,

some kind of controversy or some kind of like something like if your ad is not able to be talked about other than yeah i liked it it's funny and it's not really like it's not going to stick around on social media right yeah i just want to know how many of us actually went out oh i'm already a customer is that yours in the fridge? Yeah. That stuff's nasty. Are you sampling everyone's stuff? Well, I run out of my almond creamer occasionally and I'm looking for a substitute. I tried Oatly. That may have been a prop.

We filmed a tech talk and I think we watered it down. We secretly replaced your creamer. Who did what? I mean, it's nothing to luxury. You know, informal qualitative survey, though, right? You have to gather at the Super Bowl and everyone stopped to watch it. Yep. And, you know, listen, back to your point, Tyler,

advertising is an excuse to go up and, you know, get coffee or do something else. Typically, at the Super Bowl, everybody stopped to watch the commercials. Absolutely. She used to go up and get coffee or do something else, typically. At the Super Bowl, everybody stopped to watch the commercials. Absolutely. And everybody to a person was like, God, that was stupid. There wasn't anybody that liked it. And it reminded me of the E-Trade commercial probably 15 years ago. And it was a monkey in a garage with a bunch of these crazy characters

that they spent, I'm sure, weeks casting. And there was no point to just this crazy thing going on. And the announcer at the end says, well, we just blew $3 million. And it was E-Trade. And it was bizarre to be bizarre. Again, the first three seconds, I was like, oh, God, CEO, I want to be in it. Like I mentioned last week, I mean, I knew there was intent in it being as bad as it was.

That was what it was on purpose for. And the fact of the matter is, I actually went to the store and was going to buy it, but wherever I was at, I didn't have it. And I was like, I was thinking about it. that didn't have it and i was like i was thinking about it yeah so it was worrying me i was like i gotta try this like you know yeah my craziness of uh appreciating the marketing side of it but uh but so think about it they i haven't seen that ad since i don't watch a ton of tv but i watched enough news i think i would have caught it i don't know that they're even they even have a Because, again, you would turn it.

But it worked because it was the Super Bowl and you couldn't turn it. And so they knew it would resonate with you. Even if seemingly perceived negative, it was doing something to your brain. I want to see how many views it's gotten on YouTube. Right? I mean, I'm watching. Sure. That's a great point. That'll be 30-day sales.

So the big thing, at least we do have a stat, and I don't know the exact percentage, but I've seen that their search results or their searches have been up over at least 15-19% since the Super Bowl,

which is, you know, fairly massive considering like one, the product, but two, like that in comparison to some of the other brands in the Super Bowl. So people have been looking for it, people have been searching for it. And I'm sure there's going to be a case study down the line that actually is able to identify the sales numbers as well and equate that back to the spike that we saw during the Super Bowl from this advertisement. I love it.

Cool, so let's take a look at these results. So I think the one thing as before we show the advertisement itself is, one, remember that we're looking at detail memory encoding and specifically memory encoding at key moments and like remembering or understanding what people are committing to memory. And the thing about this advertisement is it's a product-focused advertisement. It's a little weird, a little strange, almost has a similar vibe to the Cadbury Gorilla

advertisement, which is very song based but this features the ad or features the brand more prominently and then once we see branding throughout the ad but also at end branding it builds a big story for the brand and people are like oh what the heck is this no cow this is Oatly. You know, it works. It's so quirky, it works. So let's go ahead and play it. So as this guy's singing about the ad or singing about the brand,

people are trying to pick up on what's going on. We have this slow zoom out and memory encoding is coinciding with these different elements as more of the story is being shown. But once the brand comes on screen, and we have the brand featured very prominently on screen, we see memory encoding within the 99th percentile

of our entire database, right? So when we have this Oatly end card, people are committing Oatly to to memory which memory is going to drive some sort of consumer behavior later on so that's why we're seeing this big spike in people talking about oatly and what you see on social media is people aren't just saying you know that ad with the guy in the brown shirt playing the keyboard people are are saying that Oatly advertisement. And that's what has staying power in this context. It's so weird, it sticks out amongst all the other celebrities, all the other emotions

that people are trying to drive home. And it features the brand, probably in a way, very similar to the Cadbury ad that we just looked at. Not surprised. Not surprised. I mean, you called it. Well,

I just knew that it was such a departure from everything else we've seen. Right. That it had to be resonating in some way.

And I, I, I bet you yourself. I just, I just think like, Oh yeah. Cause people are intent, even though I've been at commercials suck, they're sales. I just didn't see it played. Oh, yeah. Because people are intent.

Even though they're like, man, that commercial sucks. They're like, the recall is there. So they're going to see that label in the grocery store, wherever it's available. The recall is going to be there. It's kind of like, hmm. It's kind of that kind of product anyway. Because, you know, you're like coffee and different things you put in coffee, that's a hot category, I think, anyway.

So a new type of thing that you would never consider. You know, like, I don't know. It's brilliant. So does that blow up reach and frequency? Because it's only run once. For all intents and purposes, unless you seek it out. Right? Yeah.

All right. Yep. No, absolutely. purposes unless you seek it out right yeah all right yep no absolutely beforehand i was familiar with the brand beforehand because they um spend most of their marketing budget behind stickers and t-shirts and posters and coffee shops um and so they they had always our official coffee stop yeah yeah they always had the quirky stuff of like Sedona milk or something. And they had like over the urinals at a shop down the road, they had posters that said they'll put an Oatly ad anywhere these days. They were already doing the irreverent.

I wonder if it gets into an old episode of getting away from the mass branding of they're not trying to make Oatly this big prestigious brand idea. It's the CEO just hanging out. He's like, the energy of it. It's kind of like, Oatly, we don't have milk.

It's Oats. I think you bring up an interesting kind of sidebar there when you're talking about, you know, trying not to make it a big prestigious brand. We see a similar thing. Maybe this is something we can discuss at some other time. But, you know, just the idea of micro-influencers versus macro-influencers, right? Yeah. influencers right yeah we tend to see a lot more success with micro influencers because you know you have this dichotomy between you know how much people think about the brand versus how much people think about the celebrity right so with the macro influencer you tend to see you know much more popularity for that

influencer say it's like Drake and State Farm versus the brand itself. And we'll see an example of this in the next time series that I'll show you. But then in this case, we have the CEO. We don't know who he is. And there's a brand who we barely know, but we maybe know the brand a little bit more. But it also puts the brand on a stage that's equivalent to the individual who is, you know, portraying or who's telling the story that makes a greater impact for the brand overall during end of branding. Well, I don't know.

Just purely by the amount of time we spent on them, I think we validated their strategy. Yeah, sure, absolutely. And we do have the size. What's number two on our list? This is actually paid for by Oatly. That's the radcast. It's also brought to you by oatly yeah we got advertisers let's go yeah um so the next one is rocket mortgage uh this was

number one so we're going straight from the bottom on the ad meter all the way up to the top now this this is an example of an attention vampire being you know know, the celebrity within the advertisement. So what we're going to show you and the things that we want to kind of focus on here is within this advertisement, we got Tracy Morgan being featured in various different lights. You know, it's a very snappy ad. He's kind of going from like place to place to place to place, kind of what I was describing earlier. It's very montage-y. And by the end, the consumers wore out.

But another thing that you see is you have Tracy Morgan featured throughout the entire creative. And then once you get to the end branding statement, you have a change in narrator. It goes to a very ad-heavy sort of message. And people completely check out because they see it's an ad. They're like, oh crap, I don't want to be here anymore. So we're going to go ahead and share this with you.

And then, you know, I'll kind of narrate over top as well. And Tracy Morgan is one of my favorite Ascension vampires. So by far, like I understand why he did well in this one. So as the ad opens up with his family, we get to Tracy Morgan and he's sitting there in the bathtub talking about rocket mortgage but then it just cuts between different scenes and people are trying to catch up the

entire time it's very fast-paced this moment here he jumps over the bridge that's a climax you stop people check out so it's definitely going to be one of those when you're listening, you need to go watch the YouTube to get the full aspect of watching and be creative. But imagining that you're watching the Tracy Morgan Rocket Mortgage ad. So, I mean, those are two examples of the, one, you know,

where celebrity can overshadow everything. Whereas like featuring the brand in a way that puts the brand first allows you to tell a better story. Now, we've seen this multiple times, and I'll just kind of share just, I guess, war stories at this point, where, in some of these other ads that we saw, Amazon Alexa, same thing, with the Amazon Alexa ad,

what you see is various montages, same thing. With the Amazon Alexa ad, what you see is various montages, very similar to the Rocket Mortgage ad, where, you know, you have Michael B. Jordan is taking the place of Alexa, and the female protagonist is dreaming of Michael B. Jordan being in the Alexa the entire time. So she's just like dreamily talking, saying, Alexa, do this, Alexa, do that, da, da, da. And every single time it's like, you know, she's in various positions that, you know, Michael B. Jordan takes off his shirt at some point, Michael B. Jordan does this, and it's a better advertisement for Michael B. Jordan than it is for Alexa. You know, we've seen this in every single Drake ad that we've tested.

Drake is a big attention vampire. People love Drake, not the brand that he's associated with. But then you go to another ad from this year that did really well, but was number 44 on the ad meter, was Pringles. Pringles just told a very cute, fun story.

Was a fairly engaging story, but featured the brand in a way that put their brand front and center. And it was very important to them to put their brand front and center because they just went through a big rebrand. And they just rebranded in mid-December. And that was actually very effective for them. Now people were able to see this logo front and center and see the new Pringles logo and the new Pringles branding and were able to remember it. So they did a really good job. The Super Bowl was a success for them

despite not performing well in the ad meter. It was a success for Oatly despite not performing well in the ad meter, but was not so much for the big brands like Rocket Mortgage or Amazon or say like in M&M's or others that invested a ton in their advertising as well and did not perform

as well on our metrics. What's interesting is the weekend you did not get paid to do the Super Bowl. I've heard this. I was not aware of this fact about Super Bowl. Most of the time, the acts are unpaid at the Super Bowl. That was heard this. I was not aware of this back in the Super Bowl. Most of the time,

the acts are unpaid at the Super Bowl. That was news to me, but it made sense to me because of the reach and awareness that they get for their performance. So it's no different here except whoever's agents for Tracy Morgan and any

of these other celebrities get paid extra because those actors are getting paid and they're becoming the stars of the commercial. So they're getting double the awareness and they get paid. Absolutely, 100%, 100%. And the best example of a happy medium between, say, celebrity and brand is an advertisement that we worked on a couple of years ago.

There was an advertisement in 2018, and kind of talking back to Neuro Insight and where we kind of come into the fold, we tested a rough cut for our clients at Stella Artois, which was an advertisement that featured a lot of nostalgia, celebrity, and branding. And their goal was to ensure that they're able to maximize their branding within the story to ensure that they're getting the most out of their advertising, right?

Anheuser-Busch on average spends upwards of at least $20 to $30 million on advertisements, considering like five and a half million super bowl advertisements per year considering five and a half million per ad you know have at least six advertisements per um per super bowl so um within the stella artois ad they feature you know uh carrie bradshaw walking out um and you know they have the Sex and the City theme. Carrie Bradshaw flips her hair. She sits down and is asked in this restaurant whether she's going to have the usual. The usual, that being a cosmopolitan. Well, she switches up the usual and orders a Stella Artois.

Then it cuts to a big Stella Artois cutscene where we see very strong, prominent response to the brand, to Stella Artois. Then the ad kind of cuts. And then we see Jeff Bridges come in. And it's another replication of the same, you know, kind of storyline, which is Jeff Bridges, do you want to have the usual? He said, which is a white Russian. He says, no, I'm going to have a Stella Arcois. Then, you know, all hell breaks loose. And then they feature the brand again. And they're strong branding for Stella.

And within this test that we were doing, we were looking at how they can feature Stella more prominently to increase their impact post-Super Bowl. And to use Nero in our second response effectively, you have to identify, again, as we were saying, those key moments and those key elements where the brand can be seamlessly integrated into the creative without actually taking away from the storyline itself. Now, without actually taking away from the storyline itself. Now on the back end of the Super Bowl, after we did this optimization for them,

what Stella saw was purchase frequency increased by 15.1% post Super Bowl. Stella also showed the highest growth in consideration across the entire beer category post Super Bowl. The ad itself had 7.6 billion impressions, 418,000 social mentions because they're featuring the Big Lebowski, the dude from Big Lebowski.

It was the number nine most memorable brand in the Super Bowl and number nine favorite ad. So, you know, we can use this technology to understand like how to tell stories in a way that features the brand most prominently to ensure that brands are actually driving that ROI. I think that's all for the interview. Is it not, Tyler? Yeah, absolutely.

Yep. Yep. Any final thoughts from everyone as we kind of close this out? As our look at the impact of neuro in both just the Super Bowl context and the context overall. How does it, what does it make you think, Mike, a creative one, if you think differently about creating the end? Makes me thirsty.

I want to sell out. No, it makes perfect sense. And I know, Darla, you've made a right and left analogy, too. no it makes perfect sense and I looked earlier you made a right and left analogy too makes you kind of watch things differently and especially the thinking of like

attention vampires a lot of times it doesn't have to be a human to be an attention vampire I think in the future your future business model should be around you you know, how people's brain responds to listening to podcasts. You know, certain forms. We've done some research on the podcast world. We can, you know, give you some insights.

I'll tell you what, people do love podcasts. To get very meta with it, guys. podcast to get very meta with it guys um you know we've seen that you know podcasts are an engaging realm and just audio in general because it forces the brain to kind of wander in a way that uh you know forcing a visual in front of somebody's face doesn't yeah yeah theater theater of the mind right absolutely 100 100 it's awesome. We really enjoyed this two-part series with Tyler Lewis, Director of Client Solutions at NeuroInsight. Tyler, where can everybody keep up with

all things? I know we did this last week, but in case someone's tuning in this week, where can they keep up with everything with NeuroInsight? Absolutely. You can find us at neuroinsight.com. We're at NeuroInsight on LinkedIn, and we're at neuro underscore insight on Twitter and Instagram. Awesome. Thank you, Mike. And you know where to find us. We're at theradcast.com and at the.radcast on Instagram. You can find me on Instagram at Ryan Alford 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. If you've been enjoying the rad cast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else.

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