Council Objectives
The Cognition Council explores the way consumers’ attention, emotional response, and memory are affected by their use of multiple media platforms and level of conscious or sub-conscious receptivity to media or messages.
The council plans to issue publications and presentations about the cognitive impact of advertising from both the perspectives of neurological research and traditional measures like brand recall and intent.
Research and Past Event Highlights
The Relevance and Power of Context in Today’s Media Environment
This pair of panels provided an in-depth look at two major issues in taking context effects into account in media planning and buying — advertising within news content and programmatic buying. In the first panel, speakers from NBCU, CNN, and Lumen Research presented research on the effectiveness of advertising within news content on television and on digital platforms. The second panel featured a discussion with speakers from Nestle, Reset Digital, Hearst, Crackle, and Mindshare on the potential opportunity for integrating the context in which an ad is placed into programmatic buying. Find presentations and video here.
Context Effects: Updates from the Front Lines
This special session at the ARF’s AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference focused on the question of how marketers can use context to enhance their ads’ performance and avoid context that might impact the ad and brand negatively. After a summary of prior research on this topic by the ARF’s Horst Stipp, Bill Harvey, Executive Chairman at RMT, Inc., synthesized research on the substantial improvements in ad performance that can occur when consumers’ reactions to context and the ad align on several emotional dimensions, rather than just one. Kimberly Rose Clark, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer at the Dept. of Psychological & Brain Science, Dartmouth College, then presented the results of her experiment on congruence between context and ads based on their gain or loss framing. The final presentation from Robin Garfield, EVP of Research and Scheduling at CNN, reviewed the evidence on the power of news programming as a context for ads.