Implicit learning from advertising first requires attention
A large amount of our knowledge is implicit. We did not set out to learn something, but somehow it ended up in our memory. This fact is important to marketers because people do not learn about brands the same way they learn math at school. Instead, people learn about brands incidentally, passively, implicitly. But that does not mean that advertising works without attention.
Implicit knowledge
The other day, I found myself singing the lyrics to Green Shirt by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. To do so, I was drawing on implicit knowledge. Given that I had also been reading academic papers about priming I may also have been primed to remember those specific lyrics. These lines from the song seem all too appropriate to my task,
Better send a begging letter to the big investigation
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?
I'll return to the concept of priming (a form of implicit memory) in another post, but, for now, let's focus on how I learnt the words to that song.
I did not set out to learn the lyrics, but I did. I cannot explicitly remember when or where I first heard the song (other than a long time ago), but I can recall the words automatically. The lack of conscious effort devoted to learning and the automatic recall are both signs that my knowledge is implicit not explicit.
Speaking of explicit memories, I do know that I once attended an Elvis Costello concert at what is now the Regent Theatre in Ipswich. This is an example of episodic knowledge, memories of an event that happened to me, rather than semantic knowledge, which would be the fact that Elvis Costello and the Attractions were a popular "new wave" band.
Attention and repetition help us learn
So, why do I remember the lyrics to Green Shirt so easily? First, and foremost, I enjoyed the song. I was happy to listen to it repeatedly, maybe even sing along to it. It also had some meaning for me. If you asked me at the time what that meaning was, I doubt I could have vocalized it beyond a vague rejection of authoritarianism, but I did know it was music both my friends and I enjoyed.
Contrast this with the conjugation of Latin verbs, which I labored to learn at school. I did not enjoy learning to conjugate the present tense of amo (to love), but I consciously forced myself to attend to my homework and repeated that conjugation many, many times. As a result, I can still repeat amo, amas, amat, etc., many years later.
So, repetition is a shared element of learning, be it implicit or explicit, but so too is attention. To learn either implicitly or explicitly, one must pay attention, devoting mental resources to what is going on. (For a more considered definition of attention, and a recent review of associated research, click here.) The only difference is that in one case I wanted to pay attention to the song, in the other case I forced myself to attend to the task of learning. One thing is for sure, I can remember a lot more of Elvis Costello's lyrics today than I can Latin.
Most academic research finds implicit learning requires attention
Low Involvement Processing (LIP) is a theory of advertising which holds that implicit learning can happen with minimal attention but lots of repetition. Based on all the evidence I have seen I think that theory is flawed. Memory involves three distinct phases: encoding, storage, and retrieval. For something to be remembered, first it must be encoded and that requires initial attention. For instance, a 2016 paper by Prull, Lawless, Marshall, and Sherman reviews past research into memory encoding and states that,
So, if you want someone to learn something, far better if, at first, they are actively attending to what is going on. Even if what is going on is advertising.
A spoonful of sugar
True, people are not very interested in your brand. It may be totally irrelevant to them right now, so they would rather not pay attention to its advertising. Nor do they want advertising to interrupt what they are doing. Which is why you need to offer them a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. (You recognize that figure of speech, right? Where does that come from? What type of memory is that?) Presenting people with interesting, involving, amusing, enjoyable, and distinctive content will encourage the audience to give their attention to what is shown and said, and they will implicitly learn from that experience. And they will learn a lot faster if that content is likeable than if it is boring, bland, dull, confusing, or mundane.
Implicit learning is essential to brand marketing
Performance marketing aims for an immediate, behavioral response. A person need only remember the ad exposure long enough to decide to respond or not. By contrast, however, brand marketers are trying to influence both people ready to buy now and those who will buy in future. To influence future behavior requires that brand advertising create memorable impressions and that requires learning to take place. The problem is that given most people do not need to buy your brand now, they probably have little interest in learning about it. To get them to learn you must offer them something worth their time, to get their attention (a spoonful of sugar, remember?).
The interesting things is that because advertising impressions are so fleeting, they require repetition for the ideas conveyed to remain easily accessible in memory. And it turns out that when an ad has been attended to once, LIP may apply on subsequent exposures. But that is a post for another day.
Meanwhile, what do you think? Do you believe advertising requires attention to be effective? Please share your thoughts.
Postscript
Implicit knowledge
The other day, I found myself singing the lyrics to Green Shirt by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. To do so, I was drawing on implicit knowledge. Given that I had also been reading academic papers about priming I may also have been primed to remember those specific lyrics. These lines from the song seem all too appropriate to my task,
Better send a begging letter to the big investigation
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?
I'll return to the concept of priming (a form of implicit memory) in another post, but, for now, let's focus on how I learnt the words to that song.
I did not set out to learn the lyrics, but I did. I cannot explicitly remember when or where I first heard the song (other than a long time ago), but I can recall the words automatically. The lack of conscious effort devoted to learning and the automatic recall are both signs that my knowledge is implicit not explicit.
Speaking of explicit memories, I do know that I once attended an Elvis Costello concert at what is now the Regent Theatre in Ipswich. This is an example of episodic knowledge, memories of an event that happened to me, rather than semantic knowledge, which would be the fact that Elvis Costello and the Attractions were a popular "new wave" band.
Attention and repetition help us learn
So, why do I remember the lyrics to Green Shirt so easily? First, and foremost, I enjoyed the song. I was happy to listen to it repeatedly, maybe even sing along to it. It also had some meaning for me. If you asked me at the time what that meaning was, I doubt I could have vocalized it beyond a vague rejection of authoritarianism, but I did know it was music both my friends and I enjoyed.
Contrast this with the conjugation of Latin verbs, which I labored to learn at school. I did not enjoy learning to conjugate the present tense of amo (to love), but I consciously forced myself to attend to my homework and repeated that conjugation many, many times. As a result, I can still repeat amo, amas, amat, etc., many years later.
So, repetition is a shared element of learning, be it implicit or explicit, but so too is attention. To learn either implicitly or explicitly, one must pay attention, devoting mental resources to what is going on. (For a more considered definition of attention, and a recent review of associated research, click here.) The only difference is that in one case I wanted to pay attention to the song, in the other case I forced myself to attend to the task of learning. One thing is for sure, I can remember a lot more of Elvis Costello's lyrics today than I can Latin.
Most academic research finds implicit learning requires attention
Low Involvement Processing (LIP) is a theory of advertising which holds that implicit learning can happen with minimal attention but lots of repetition. Based on all the evidence I have seen I think that theory is flawed. Memory involves three distinct phases: encoding, storage, and retrieval. For something to be remembered, first it must be encoded and that requires initial attention. For instance, a 2016 paper by Prull, Lawless, Marshall, and Sherman reviews past research into memory encoding and states that,
"Attention at encoding is also necessary for implicit memory, in which memories are revealed in performance changes on tasks that make no reference to study events and do not require the deliberate retrieval processes that are involved in explicit memory. In such studies, encoding-phase DA (divided attention) reduces repetition priming, a form of implicit memory, on some but not all implicit memory tests (e.g., Parkin et al., 1990; Schmitter-Edgecombe, 1996; Szymanski and MacLeod, 1996; Mulligan, 1998; Gabrieli et al., 1999; Light et al., 2000; Rajaram et al., 2001; Mulligan and Peterson, 2008; see Spataro et al., 2011 for review)."
So, if you want someone to learn something, far better if, at first, they are actively attending to what is going on. Even if what is going on is advertising.
A spoonful of sugar
True, people are not very interested in your brand. It may be totally irrelevant to them right now, so they would rather not pay attention to its advertising. Nor do they want advertising to interrupt what they are doing. Which is why you need to offer them a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. (You recognize that figure of speech, right? Where does that come from? What type of memory is that?) Presenting people with interesting, involving, amusing, enjoyable, and distinctive content will encourage the audience to give their attention to what is shown and said, and they will implicitly learn from that experience. And they will learn a lot faster if that content is likeable than if it is boring, bland, dull, confusing, or mundane.
Implicit learning is essential to brand marketing
Performance marketing aims for an immediate, behavioral response. A person need only remember the ad exposure long enough to decide to respond or not. By contrast, however, brand marketers are trying to influence both people ready to buy now and those who will buy in future. To influence future behavior requires that brand advertising create memorable impressions and that requires learning to take place. The problem is that given most people do not need to buy your brand now, they probably have little interest in learning about it. To get them to learn you must offer them something worth their time, to get their attention (a spoonful of sugar, remember?).
The interesting things is that because advertising impressions are so fleeting, they require repetition for the ideas conveyed to remain easily accessible in memory. And it turns out that when an ad has been attended to once, LIP may apply on subsequent exposures. But that is a post for another day.
Meanwhile, what do you think? Do you believe advertising requires attention to be effective? Please share your thoughts.
Postscript
Honestly, I am not convinced that there is real division between implicit and explicit memory in the way that standard theory would suggest. Like System 1 and 2 thinking, it feels like a convenient but possibly unnecessary distinction. Is there an escalation of attention involved in accessing different memories rather than a division? Implicit memory is not meant to be verbal, so is my memory of Green Shirt an implicit procedural memory? Can implicitly learned knowledge become semantic with repetition? So many questions seem to go unanswered.
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Comments 5
Guest - Paul Edwards
on Tuesday, 13 December 2022 07:35
But viewed as a metaphor, system 1/2 etc is quite a useful way of thinking about how the brain works - we are probably still quite a way off knowing how it really works?
Nigel Hollis
on Tuesday, 13 December 2022 16:25
I think we are a long way off! I vaguely remember Kahneman suggesting the distinction was artificial but useful, but couldn't find it. However, if there are two Systems, I can't help feeling poor old System 2 gets less credit than it deserves. And poor old System 1 gets blamed for a bunch of stuff when it is doing its best. Amazing we all survived this long.
Guest - Dominic Twose
on Wednesday, 14 December 2022 11:51
Years ago there was a paper, High Attention Processing: the Real Power of Advertising, by
James Mundell, John Hallward and Dave Walker from Ipsos-ASI. They used their pre-test and tracking study results to show that if Day After Recall of an ad was low, the chances of it having any brand effect were equally low. Ironically, it received little attention at the time. but it was and is is an important data-based contribution to this debate. It's on WARC.
Nigel Hollis
on Wednesday, 14 December 2022 13:59
Thanks Dom, I had not seen that paper before, but it is in total agreement with the paper Erik Du Plessis and I wrote a few years earlier. LAP, LIP, or whatever may exist but it is likely to be a highly inefficient way to get your impression across.
Nigel Hollis
on Wednesday, 14 December 2022 14:01
You can find a copy of the Ipsos paper here: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/high-attention-processing-real-power-advertising