Studying How Ads Make Us ‘Think’

By Darren Hunt

EL PASO — Advertisers spend millions of dollars for 60-second spots during the Super Bowl, but what effects do the ads have on us as consumers? One El Paso company is on the cutting-edge of science to find out.

Sands Research, a West El Paso company, studies how our brains react to what the eyes take in through television advertising and what parts of our brain are stimulated the most. Consider what gets attention in what we view.

Whether it’sdancing lizards, lingerie models, or memorable music, the fact is many don’t know why certain ads appeal to them the way they do. But Dr. Steve Sands does.

“Advertisements that work well have some interesting things in them, unexpected events in them and they integrate their product throughout,” Sands said.

At his office in West El Paso, Sands monitored the brain wave activity of several research subjects who watched media ads during Super Bowl Sunday’s game. Sands, a psychology professor at UTEP, said the neuromedia analysis showed consumers are becoming more savvy with respect to ads.

With some fancy headgear monitoring brain waves, represented by color changes, Sands said that commercials which made the viewer ‘think’ more generated the most activity.

The ad that generated the most activity was one which featured a soft drink with subtitles. Viewers watched the ad with the volume turned down, but because of the subtitling, the brain was processing the words on the screen.

His research has found the first 800 milliseconds of an ad are all that are required to capture the attention. Because of his work, Sands feels advertisers will pay attention to how their ads are made and what ‘memorable effect’ they want to have on their audiences.