Advertising doesn't work the way you think it does

sophisticated people have a sophisticated understanding of advertising they think modern advertisements don't try to rationally or logically persuade us to buy products no they work by manipulating our emotions creating a subconscious association between their product and some positive emotion or idea this theory is popular but it is wrong not only does advertising not typically work in this emotion-based way I will argue that it never works this way my argument is based on some fundamental facts about the human mind and by the end of this video I think you'll be convinced but in order to do

that I have to lay out the theory then summarize a Leonardo DiCaprio movie then explain one of the most important ideas in the history of psychology in like 30 seconds then introduce an alternative theory of how advertising works then show a clip from the television show madman then explain the 1919 experiment that confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity and show how that shows that the original theory of advertising was attractive but wrong and then pull it all together in the end so let's go the commonly accepted theory of advertising that I laid out a few

seconds ago has been given the name emotional Inception the name was coined by Kevin simler and was inspired by the 2010 movie Inception in the movie Leonardo DiCaprio uses some sci-fi technology to enter people's dream dreams while they're asleep and implant ideas into their subconscious Minds like the main thing that they're trying to do is sneak into this one guy's mind through his dreams and implant the idea that he should dissolve his father's energy conglomerate side note they have this incredible power where they can plant ideas in people's minds and instead of using it to

like stop a war or something they use it to weaken one big Corporation so that another big Corporation can make more money whatever obviously some advertisements especially older ones try to make an explicit rational argument in favor of their product our toothache medicine is fast acting more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette but the emotional Inception Theory says that most Modern Advertising isn't rational in that way it's emotional the ads don't contain any actual information they try to plant in people's minds a simple thought like if I smoke Camel cigarettes I'll be cool I'll

be a cool camel with a human body the television show Madmen is about 1960s advertising Executives who drink alcohol at lunch and refuse to acknowledge their own Trauma from fighting in the Korean War they never use this term emotional Inception but the whole show is built on this exact theory for example there are these Executives from Kodak who go into this meeting assuming that the advertisers who they are hiring to sell their circular slide projector will do so by finding some way to tout the technology in the product so have you figured out a way

to work the wheel into it we know it's hard because Wheels aren't really seen as exciting technology even though they are the original but the main character in the show Don Draper gently dismisses this idea and instead suggests an emotional approach well technology is a glittering lure but U there's the Rarity occasion when the public can be engaged on a level Beyond flash if they have a Sentimental bond with the product then he tells this whole long story about his mentor in the field of advertising who's named Teddy you don't have to worry about that

the point is just that Don is going to recommend that they sell their product by creating an emotional connection between the product and the idea of personal Nostalgia and because this is a dramatic television show Dawn makes the pitch for the advertising campaign using the product itself the slide projector and photos of his own family and this is the end of season 1 so by this point the audience knows that Dawn's hubris extramarital Affairs and alcoholism have destroyed his marriage and his relationship with his children but he also talked about a deeper bond with the

product nostalgia it's delicate but potent sweetheart Teddy told me that in Greek Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound it's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone this device isn't a spaceship it's a time machine goes backwards and forwards takes us to a place where we ache to go again it's not called The Wheel it's called the carousel let's just travel the way a child travels around and around and back home again [Music] to a place where we know we are loved [Music] they are going to create an emotional

connection and then this guy [Music] cries good luck at your next meeting this is all classic emotional Inception Theory but as appealing as this theory is my goal in the next few minutes is to persuade you that the emotional Inception theory is a myth emotional Inception does not occur first notice that this theory is totally pavlovian in 1897 the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had all these dogs and he said to them dogs I'm going to strap you into this absurd 19th century Contraption to measure how much saliva you produce and I'm going to ring a

bell and then feed you and then ring a bell and then feed you and the dog said wo and after a few repetitions of this Pavlov would ring the bell and the dogs would produce the saliva whether they got the food or not and Pavlov would say thanks dogs together we just invented classical conditioning but only I'm going to get The Nobel Prize and he did the emotional Inception Theory says that advertisers do basically the same thing just as pavlof trained his dogs to associate the bell ringing with food so to advertisers train us to

associate let's say energy drinks with very unsafe behavior and a sense of adventure okay but if you stop and think about it this Theory makes human beings incredibly irrational the dogs that Pavlov was feeding 130 years ago they're pretty rational when the dogs are being trained they are actually given food but according to the emotional Inception Theory advertisers are able to train us without giving us anything it would be one thing if they gave us a Red Bull and then let us actually ride a motorcycle but advertisements just show us a picture of someone else

riding a motorcycle when you think about it this Theory says that someone we don't know or trust without our permission can basically hypnotize us into salivating over energy drinks just by showing us some pictures of course it is true that there's been an enormous amount of economic and psychological research demonstrating human irrationality but still it would be nice if there was some alternative theory that could explain these advertisements maybe even explain them better without making humans out to be staggeringly irrational well there is to illustrate this alternative theory of advertising I'm going to read an

onion headline the onion is a satirical newspaper the headlines and articles they're jokes here is a headline from 2018 beer scanned for something a-hole friend won't mock that's just good I don't even have to read you the article that's how brilliant of a headline it is the point is for a lot of things we are not just buying them for what they can do for us we're buying them for what they say about us to other people the alternative theory of advertising that I'm going to propose in a few seconds agrees with emotional Inception theory

that advertisers do create associations arbitrary connections between some product and some idea but according to this Theory what happens next is that we choose to buy those products as a way of purposefully communicating to other people something about ourselves these days I'm just an old man college professor but long ago in a time of much more hair I was a graduate student in England almost all of my friends were other students it was a very fancy school we all studied studed very hard and at the end of the day we'd go to a pub and

drink a dark ale usually we drink one or two beers and then we would go home at a reasonable hour and go to sleep so that we could wake up the next morning and go to the library but in England at that time and I assume still today there was this drink strong bow now strong bow is not beer it's hard apple cider it's basically apple juice that gets you drunk it does not taste good but it's easy to drink a lot of it quickly so one night when one of our friends Lindsay showed up

with a 24pack of strong bow that communicated something she didn't have to say anything just the fact that she showed up with this product that she had purchased that let us know like oh this girl's here to party sometimes you want to come across to other people as sophisticated and sometimes you want to come across as fun the idea this theory is that advertisers associate their product with some idea in this case wild partying and then it's not like you know according to this Theory when we see the product the idea of wild partying pops

up into our heads and then we're sort of emotionally drawn to buy the product no according to this Theory we rationally choose to buy the product in order to associate ourselves with the idea I'm calling this the social connotation theory of advertising I'm borrowing the term connotation from John Stewart Mill who 180 years ago published a system of logic and in that he used the term connotative to refer to those names that communicate additional information you don't have to remember any of that all that matters is that according to this Theory the job of the

advertiser is easy with emotional Inception the advertiser had to be like Leonardo DiCaprio like speaking into our minds and manipulating our emotions but according to this Theory all the advertiser has to do is like throw out there that like hey this signals that and then we choose to use those signals like language however we see fit also Leonardo DiCaprio only agrees to do the Inception and get the energy conglomerate dissolved because Mr Sao promises to get Leo's criminal record cleared so that he can go back to like see his children but if Leo can like

implant ideas in people's minds why doesn't he just implant in the mind of like the governor or something the idea of pardoning him how can syo get him pardoned but Leo himself who has the power of inception can't we are now almost ready to present the actual argument that shows that this theory is false and this theory is correct but before we cook that recipe there are still two ingredients that are missing first there's the indisputable fact at the heart of the social connotation theory that buying things is a public act you've heard the term

conspicuous consumption it was coined by The Economist Thorston Vin in his 1899 book the theory of the Leisure Class who is the Leisure Class we are Vin pointed out that the Industrial Revolution created a new class of people who were not as wealthy as royalty but nonetheless had enough money to engage in consumption that is the acquisition and using up of stuff that is conspicuous that is visible to other people the opposite of inconspicuous he needed to coin this term because prior to that moment in history this phenomenon did not exist really really rich people

had been showing off for a long time but the idea that masses millions of people had enough money to buy stuff just to communicate things about themselves was genuinely new the Industrial Revolution like was a big deal okay so there's one last ingredient in the argument recipe for social connotation Theory to work it's not enough for Lindsay to know in her own mind that strong bow means you know to turn up to get lit to go carousing to overindulge to whoop it up that's not enough if her purchase of that product is going to communicate

to the rest of us something about her then we also have to know that strong bow means those things you know that strong bow means a party a beino a hully whoo this is all real slang folks I know it I know the slang and actually that's not even enough in order for her to use Strongbow to communicate something about herself she has to know that we know that strong bow means that stuff it's not enough for her to know something about strong bow and for us to know something about strong bow she has to

know something about what we know about strong bow and on top of that in order for us to know that she's using the drink to communicate something to us we have to know that she knows that we know that strong bow means crunk time or whatever I'm running out of slang and maybe this chain of us that they know that we know that they know that we know maybe this this cycle of knowledge of each other's knowledge maybe this goes on forever in academic philosophy this is called common knowledge it goes back at least to

David Lewis's seminal 1969 book convention you don't have to remember that you just need to know that in order for this Theory to work the idea that you know strong bow means or is associated with wild partying that idea needs to be out there in society and we have to know that it's out there in society this will end up being very important to the demonstration that the emotional Inception theory is a myth which is going to happen the demonstration it's coming in like 30 seconds but first I think the way I've been presenting things

so far is slightly misleading really there are all all different sorts of advertisements some ads do just present straightforward information about their products and some ads do seem to contain virtually no information and of course many actual advertisements do multiple things at the same time but one of the most common types of advertisement perhaps the most common type these days is what I'm going to call the association ad in these advertisements what's clearly going on is that Advertiser is trying to get you to associate their product with some idea and it seems clear that the

emotional Inception Theory and the social connotation Theory are really just competing explanations for this specific subspecies of advertisement okay so how can we choose between these two competing theories well in science perhaps the best way to choose between two theories of the same phenomenon is to use both of those theories to generate predictions and then see which predictions turn out to be true for example with gravity Isaac Newton was like gravity is a force of attraction between all bodies oh no here comes the Bubonic plague while we're all quarantining I'll invent calculus and 200 years

later Albert Einstein was like shave it Newton massive objects warp SpaceTime gravity is not a force of attraction it's just a name for the bending of SpaceTime how are we going to choose between these two theories well if Einstein is right then we would expect that light traveling past a very large object will curve due to the warping of SpaceTime and you know what's pretty big the Sun the problem is that the sun is so bright that we can't see right next to it where its gravity is so strong that we would be able to

observe the light from distant Stars being curved but Einstein was like if we observe the Sun during a solar eclipse when the moon is blocking most of the Sun's light we will be able to measure light curving look that's the best German accent I've got and that's what we needed a prediction and there was a solar eclipse coming up in 1914 so we can just observe the Sun during that solar eclipse and test Einstein's theory but then this guy killed this guy and so these guys went to war against these guys and everybody was too

busy fighting World War I to observe the solar eclipse so they had to wait until another solar eclipse in 1919 oh yeah the light is curving that's that's exactly what you would expect based on Einstein's theory so Newton how do you like them apples so now we can do this exact thing with these two theories they each generate a prediction and we see which prediction turns out to be right if the emotional Inception theory is correct then we would expect to find Association ads in basically all of the places where advertising happens Billboards television commercials

bus stop benches internet popups Direct Mail door tags Those ads at the top of Google searches they to look like search results but really are paid advertisements if creating the association between the product and the idea really does do Inception on our brains then that should be equally effective in all of these different places but if social connotation theory is correct then we would expect to find Association ads only in some places why well because social connotation Theory relies on common knowledge and common knowledge only occurs in some of these places with a Super Bowl

advertisement it's not just that millions of people see the advertisement those millions of people also know that everybody else sees the advertisement that's common knowledge but with an internet popup ad The Advertiser can pay for the same number of people millions of people to see the ad but none of those people know how many other people are seeing the ad so there's no common knowledge and according to Social connotation Theory Association ads only work they only allow us to communicate things about ourselves if we can be assured via common knowledge that the other people are

going to understand what we're doing so according to this Theory these kinds of ads only work in those advertising contexts where there's common knowledge okay so our two theories generate alternative predictions and now we just need to look and see which one is correct is it true that Association ads you know appear in all of the different places where there's advertising or is it true that Association ads only appear in those advertising types that generate common knowledge well let's look at like these door hanger advertisements that I get on my house all the time they're

always ads you know packed with information for something like a house that's for sale or air conditioning repair or something like that it's never an ad for Coca-Cola or Nike this is exactly what the social connotation theory predicts because when I go home and find this piece of paper hanging on my door I can't be confident that like all of my friends also got this same piece of paper on their doors so this type of AD does not generate common knowledge can't be used to communicate things about ourselves and in so far as advertisers know

what they're doing they won't use this form of advertising for Association ads the advertising in format that generates the most common knowledge are television commercials appearing during huge sporting events like the Super Bowl or the World Cup that's because when you see one of those advertisements you can be confident that millions of other people have also seen those advertisements and those people also know that you've seen those advertisements so the next time you watch one of those sporting events look and see if as the social connotation theory predicts a dis proportionate number of those ads

are Association ads as opposed to some other type the results will be overwhelming the idea at the heart of social connotation theory is that for many of us much of the time buying something is like waving our hands in the air and saying look at me I'm this type of person form your opinion of me based on this product but here's the thing if someone is responding to an advertisement by purchasing a product in order to communicate something about themselves then they are being rational it's not like they're being you know emotionally manipulated or something

like that and speaking of irrational apparently when the van that they're sleeping in in the first level dream falls off the bridge that affects the gravity in the second level dream with Joseph Gordon levit in the hotel okay but if gravity stuff transfers dream levels then why doesn't the zero gravity in the second level dream transfer over to the third level L dream in the snow Fortress to really bring things to a climax the two theories that we are comparing not only yield predictions about where we see Association ads they also yield predictions about for

which types of products we see Association ads social scientists have shown that some products like what car we drive or anything having to do with what music we listen to communicate more about our identities than some other products like what dish soap we use now the emotional Inception Theory yields the prediction that we would see Association ads for all different types of products because emotional manipulation emotional connections they are all just as possible for Q-tips as they are for sneakers but social connotation Theory yields the prediction that we would see Association ads only for those

products that other people can see us using and that is exactly what we find we see tons of Association ads for beer and soft drinks and cars and shoes but we only see information ads if we see any ads at all for detergent or dish soap or bed sheets I mean there is a $1 104 billion market for home beding but have you ever in your life seen a single advertisement for bed sheets also it is clearly established that you have to be hooked into the dream machine in order to be an active participant in

the next level dream but who do we find in level four Sao who was never hooked in in level three hi it's me in my office if you have a long enough attention span to make it this far in the video then you might be interested in the book that I'm writing if you click the link in the description below and put in your email address I will email you when the book is ready I promise I will not send you a million emails I will not sell your email address to spammers all you will

get is an email from me when the book is for sale and I will pick a bunch of those emails and those people will get free copies of the book The ideas in this video were heavily influenced by Kevin simler linked to his website in the description and also by Jonah burger from the University of Pennsylvania and thanks to Professor Adam Bradley for putting this topic on my radar