Neuro-signaling techniques in advertisement endorsements: Unveiling consumer responses and behavioral trends

Advertising agencies often debate the value of video advertisements and the information they provide customers. Advertising aims to persuade potential customers to buy a product or service to facilitate its industrial trade. Research has to be done further to understand the fundamental mechanisms influencing consumer shopping behavior and how advertising influences it. So, an attempt has been made for the first time to understand the brain activities influenced by viewing different advertisement genres. The approach determines how viewers responded to TV advertisements using electroencephalography (EEG) biomarkers and how different commercial genres and their contents affected viewers’ neural functions. Twenty-two volunteers participated, watching video commercials with celebrities, animals, dialogues, animation and jingle advertisements ranging from 50 to 90 s. EEG signals have been recorded in 14 electrode locations while watching advertisements; raw signals are pre-processed, and 19 features are extracted using wavelet decomposition techniques.

Similarly, brain functional connectivity network was drawn on each EEG band using nodes and edges. From the statistical analysis, theta band energy and ratio features (heart rate index, performance load index, task load index) are significantly (p<0.05) high for celebrity, jingle and animation when compared to the other three advertisements in most of the electrode locations. The functional brain connectivity graphs imply that information transmission strength was high in the right side of the frontal, temporal and parietal regions, as neurons are dominantly activated while viewing celebrity, jingle and animal advertisements. While viewing the celebrity advertisement, the decisions about subjective preferences and good emotions are linked with increased theta band activity in the frontal brain, and most information related to the advertisement content are transferred to the long-term memory. This will elicit the customer to like the product and persuade them to buy. Also, it is analysed that advertising with dialogues alone piques viewers’ interest less, leading to short-term memory and not being preferred by customers. The outcome of our study helps to design the factors that must be considered while making advertisements and driving market innovations.