Ad professor gets in touch with emotions

By Risa Polansky

Advertisers would love to get inside consumers’ heads to discern their emotions. Teaming up with UF’s Brain Institute, Prof. Jon Morris, a member of the College’s advertising faculty since 1984, is searching for a way there. Over the past two years, he’s placed 12 randomly selected volunteers inside an MRI machine and asked them to watch commercials and fill out surveys by pushing specially developed, scanner-safe keypad buttons – all while he observed emotional responses in their brains.

“It has been very difficult to establish a connection between what people feel when they see an ad and what they say,” said Sarat Dayal, ADV 1975, owner and president of Dayal and Associates, an ad agency with offices in Chicago and Fort Lauderdale. “If this research can establish a connection, it will have a lot of validity in the field, and advertising research would be taken more seriously.”

Since the 1990s, Morris has been using his self-response survey, called AdSAM (Advertising Self Assessment Manikin), to measure emotional responses to ads. He administers the survey inside the MRI to compare images of brain-chemical reaction to the AdSAM responses.

The project, featured earlier this year in ADWEEK, has measured responses to Evian, Gatorade and Coke campaigns, as well as public-service announcements.

“What I really wanted to do is prove AdSAM is effective,” Morris said. “We measured emotional response in two ways: by looking at brain activity and by allowing people to respond to a stimulus.”

Emotion and analytical thought combined lead to decision-making, Morris said. He aims to understand both to gain insight into behavior. The survey features drawings of a person, and respondents fill in bubbles that indicate their feelings. It uses no words – only pictures expressing feelings.

Morris used a $10,000 grant from the American Association of Advertising Agencies. He’s looking for up to $250,000, more respondents and a patent for the process.

“We had hoped to show the self report is something reflected in the brain,” Morris said. “So far, we’ve found that there is a resemblance.”

If further testing confirms Morris’ findings, they will arrive at the right time, said Richard Lutz, J.C. Penney professor of marketing in UF’s Warrington College of Business.

“It’s especially important going forward, because the 30-second TV commercial is kind of under fire now with DVR and other technologies,” said Lutz, who researches consumer response to advertising. “It’s reaching a point where advertisers are looking for other ways to reach consumers – ads need to be something people want to expose themselves to, rather than avoid. Advertisers need to create ads more appealing to emotions.