Neuroscience Behind Better Creative

Summary

Creative is often deemed the most important factor in a campaign’s success: if the creative doesn’t work, there are no sales. The difficulty is that there is a long-standing debate on what makes great creative. CBS, Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, and Nielsen Catalina Solutions partnered in this ground-breaking study to identify neuroscience tools that will help drive success on creative. This project had unprecedented scale and scope. The study tested over 900 participants on nearly 60 CPG ads across nearly 20 categories with all key neuroscience tools. The goals were to understand how neuroscience measures correlate to in-market sales, what neuroscience tool(s) are best indicators, and how to use findings to produce better creative. Major findings:

1. Each neuroscience measure DOES predict – but some tools are more predictive, and others – like facial coding, are less predictive.
2. Combining the RIGHT tools using the RIGHT measures unquestionably drives the highest level of prediction.
3. Magic in neuroscience is its ability to improve creative with granular insights.  Each tool provides a different perspective and with a level of granularity that allows you to take action.

The study also analyzed the sales lift per exposed category purchases for sister brands (i.e., brands with similar budgets and reach) to examine sales impact when comparing creative that works vs. creative that does not. In one comparison, the better creative resulted in $288 in incremental sales, while the ineffective creative resulted in only $16 in incremental sales.