Customer Reviews

The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising

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This treatise is designed for patient, methodical readers with a quest for insight. Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers' consciousness, so he reviews existing research on advertising, and includes cognitive science's understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level. His research is accessible, since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life, but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points. Du Plessis' results are accurate but may seem self-defining  such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember  and they can be difficult to apply. This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising. Given the intangible nature of creativity, a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection. Of course, the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway. We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable, systematic approach, such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media.

I am an accountant by trade who has recently taken on a volunteer advertising position. I found the book very informative in that it offered good common sensne to advertising. The conclusions were supported by research from all over the world. I will be reading it again.

As a newcomer to the advertising research field, The Advertised Mind is a very good and thorough read. I appreciated the introduction to various methods of advertising research and the relatively unbiased approach to analyzing the pro's and con's. The introduction to neuroscience was by far the best part of the book. I agree with the author that this is an exciting and promising new method to bring science to advertising research. Definitely a good read.

It says something about the mind when the most easily remembered things are advertising jingles. "The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising" is a psychological look at advertising and how people deal with it. An effective advertisement is one that stays with the viewer, and creating an advertisement that does such a thing requires understanding the mind. A scientific and psychological approach to the world of advertising, "The Advertised Mind" is required reading for psychology students and business majors.

The author's report of the Gibson/Dubow advertising recall controversy (p166-167) includes inappropriate statements which should be corrected and the record set straight.

It is not true that, "Unfortunately, the 'gist' of the 'answering' was that Larry was offended that Joel had not consulted with him before making...the results public....". Apparently the author missed my answer, published in the Journal of Advertising Research, May/June 1994, Vol. 34, No. 3, which directly rebutted Dubow's charges. It had no hint of the personal pique suggested by this quotation.

The author states, "Professor Joel Dubow reanalyzed Gibson's data and found that he was guilty of 'sloppy statistics'." This 'finding' is absurd. First, I did not conduct any statistical analysis so I could not possibly have been guilty of 'sloppy statistics'. Second, "Not Recall" contained very little 'Gibson data'-- of the 38 papers cited in this literature review, only 2 were by me and Dubow ignored both of them.

The author concludes, "Both.....and Gibson's papers have subsequently been 'debunked': that is, the evidence they presented has been shown to be invalid." Not true! There is no basis for this sweeping conclusion other than the already rebutted Dubow charges. Indeed the author himself notes, "In the end of this illuminating exchange, many people in the industry still thought that "Not Recall" provided real evidence that recall was not a valid way of measuring the effectiveness of advertsing".

Over 20 years ago, I said that the 'persuasion/recall' argument was the longest playing controversy in all of Marketing Research. Unfortunately,in 2005 it is still going on but I hope that the written record of that argument can be kept accurate.

This is a great testimony to affective advertising that people like. We know that it works...this book lays it out for us.

I found this book to be filled with irrelevant research. I had the idea that this book would be more simplistic but unfortunately it's to involved and makes no sense to the common man on the street. If you want quick straight forward ideas on marketing and advertising this is not the book for you. If you are student who is needing bucket loads of information to impress the lecturer you should buy this book.