Integrated system: the interplay of focus, recollection, and sentiment
These young whippersnappers in the office are living in some sort of alt-80s dreamland. Their playlists are filled with The Cure, Stone Roses, New Order, and that ilk. I can't for the life of me tell if this is genuine Gen Z trends or just a ploy to get my old, worn-out stories about the Bunnymen and Icelandic ley lines out of the way (that would be me, by the way). The other day, I found myself lost in a meeting when Primal Scream's Loaded blared unexpectedly out of the speakers.
For ages, I've held onto a vivid memory of the Scream at a midweek proto-hipster hangout in Aberdeen called the Flesh Exchange: the crowd and the band in identical spotted shirts, leather jeans, engineer boots, but most of all, the massive guitar blasts from the dubby bit in Loaded nearly blasting the sound system.
Except that couldn't have happened. The legendary Weatherall Balearic remix of I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have that became Loaded didn't appear until early 1990, and the gig in question was in 85 or 86.
I had constructed an entire experience around the idea of it being played. My brain had concocted its own fake nostalgic flashback fantasy, and I believed it.
These kinds of false memory concoctions aren't as rare as they might seem. In fact, all our memories are reconstructions. We don't remember the original event at all - what we remember is the last time we remembered it. Except this time, Loaded pumping out of the speakers also reminded me that my 'memory' was a sham.
According to psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, memory is incredibly malleable, more like a Weatherall remix than any original recording. Her research shows that our minds are vulnerable to suggestion, imagination, and misattribution. In one study, she even tricked 70% of a group of college students into believing they had committed a crime that never even occurred. In other words, memory isn't a static file; it's a narrative that we continually rewrite in our heads. The mere suggestion of an event can trigger a vivid recollection of something that might never have happened.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Memory didn't evolve to provide an objective record; it evolved as a tool to aid survival. It's built to prioritize the storage of information that might help us avoid danger, find resources, or navigate social alliances, not to act as a flawless data capture. Our ancestors didn't need a perfect memory; they just needed a useful one.
The industry's reliance on consumer recall as a measure of advertising effectiveness rests on even shakier foundations than we already suspected, given the real research on memory's fallibility.
But your focus group or survey respondents aren't lying. They genuinely believe their own narratives, and they have to say something to feel like they've earned their prawn sandwiches. It's just that belief is no guarantee of truth when it comes to memory.
Much of what we're presented with as 'consumer insight' is constructed on these shaky reconstructed memories, and it's nothing of the sort. It used to be the planner's job to sift through the confabulations to find the nuggets of truth. But that seems to have been forgotten.
Frustrated by the fallibility of memory-based metrics - and trying to replace and improve on traditional media metrics that measure surface-level interactions, like impressions or clicks - sections of the industry have sought out better measures. If surveys, self-reports, and viewability scores were letting us down, surely loading on some AI would be the answer, right?
There are various methods in play, but all revolve around tracking eye movements. The logic seems legit. If consumers' eyes are focusing on the ad, they must be paying attention, right? And if they're paying attention to some degree - categorized as active, passive, or non-attention - the ad must be having some kind of (abstract) effect.
Firms are also tossing around terms like 'behavioral' data, 'predictive' modeling, and media 'quality' signals. And while these terms add some more nuance, their exact meaning is still a bit hazy. Eye movement tracking does give us better data on whether an ad is seen, but it still suffers from some of the same flaws as memory recall: it's indirect, and it's not always reliable.
Because attention occurs in the mind, not the eyeballs, attention metrics are proxies for effectiveness outcomes that depend on far deeper cognitive processes and only reveal themselves after the fact. A recent Google/Ehrenberg-Bass study tried to push things a bit further by adding heart rate monitoring and brainwave measurements, and it claims that heart rates tended to slow down when participants were giving attention to an ad. While this seems legitimate, it's still based on self-reporting, much like our memory myths.
So, what does attention look like, and how is it integrated with emotion and memory? The real evidence points to something both obvious and profound: we're currently measuring the shadow of attention without the substance. New advertising metrics might help us understand the basics of whether an ad has grabbed a consumer's attention, but they still don't give us the whole picture. To truly understand the mind, we need to get upstream and understand the evolved, modular, messy human mind.
The ancient survival circuits of our brains are designed to kick into action when something novel or significant happens: heart rate slows, senses sharpen, and attention narrows. For a prehistoric human, this might have meant freezing when they heard a sudden rustling in the bushes to figure out if it was dinner or danger. When that Google-backed EBI study found heart rate slowing as an indicator of attention, it was essentially rediscovering this ancient orienting reflex, a built-in threat detection system still operating beneath the modern cortex.
Trying to isolate attention as a clean variable is a fool's errand, though, because memory, attention, and emotion didn't evolve as independent modules. Rather, they evolved as interdependent subsystems, working together to help us navigate an unpredictable world. Our ancestors who were better at noticing danger (attention), reacting emotionally (emotion), and remembering what to avoid (memory) had better odds of survival and reproduction. That's why we're here, and these faculties are still deeply ingrained today.
To truly understand real-world human behavior, we need to measure memory, attention, and emotion together and accept that what can't easily be captured. That means blending data with empathy, stats with storytelling. And it means remembering that consumers are people, not walking, talking eye-tracking devices.
Our continued obsession with recall and surface-level attention metrics is built on faulty assumptions. Marketers should consider these limitations and complement recall measures with other more objective measures like behavioral data or physiological responses for a fuller picture of ad effectiveness.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1744509/[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2421329/[3] https://www.apa.org/research/action/psychology-memory
- In light of the findings by psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, it's worth questioning the reliability of news stories and health-and-wellness content, as our memories, like a Weatherall remix, are heavily influenced by suggestion, imagination, and misattribution.
- The media's portrayal of mental health issues often relies on consumer recall and self-reporting, yet much of this information might be a product of nostalgic flashbacks or misconceptions, much like the false memories recalled in media coverage about the Flesh Exchange gig.
- Given the fragility of human memory, the advertising industry should diversify its metrics beyond consumer recall and focus on more objective measures such as behavioral data, mental-health indicators, and physiological responses, providing a more accurate picture of ad effectiveness and helping to break the cycle of nostalgic concoctions that can distort our understanding of reality.
