Nerd Alert: First Impressions Are Everything in Advertising

Welcome to Nerd Alert, a series of special episodes bridging the gap between marketing academia and practitioners. We’re breaking down highly involved, complex research into plain language and takeaways any marketer can use.

In this episode, Elena and Rob discover how our brains decide whether we like an ad in just three seconds, revealing that early emotional impact matters more than dramatic endings for advertising success.

Topics covered:   

• [01:00] "Neural Signals of Video Advertisement Liking: Insights into Psychological Processes and their Temporal Dynamics"
• [02:00] How fast people decide if they like or dislike an ad
• [03:00] Brain activity shifts from emotion to social cognition to evaluation
• [04:00] Early neural signals predict population-level ad performance
• [05:00] First 10 seconds matter more than the ending
• [06:00] Why early branding beats waiting until the end 

 





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Resources: 
Chan, Hang-Yee, Maarten A. S. Boksem, Vinod Venkatraman, Roeland C. Dietvorst, Christin Scholz, Khoi Vo, Emily B. Falk, and Ale Smidts. 2024. “Neural Signals of Video Advertisement Liking: Insights into Psychological Processes and Their Temporal Dynamics.” Journal of Marketing Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437231194319
 

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