Could brain science be peace broker in the ‘Recall Wars’?

David Penn

Building on the new understanding of the mind provided by brain science, David Penn, managing director and co-founder of Conquest Research, looks at the conscious/unconscious divide in advertising processing and undertakes a study to assess whether recall or recognition is the better measure of advertising affect.

Could Brain Science be Peace Broker in the 'Recall Wars'?

David Penn

This article aims to build on the new understanding of the mind provided by brain science. It hypothesises that much advertising nowadays works below the level of conscious awareness (ie implicitly), but that affective advertising does not work exclusively through implicit learning. Therefore, both recall and recognition may be effective means of measurement for so-called affective advertising; further, that attempts to prejudge advertising as either rational or affective are highly problematic.

Advertising research grew up under the influence of the mid-20th-century model of cognitive science, and many researchers...

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