February 26, 2020.

At Spark North, Shazia Ginai, CEO Neuro-Insight joined us to provide an overview of research they conducted in partnership with Magnetic, which measured the brain activity and behaviour of people exposed to media content from a variety of media platforms, including magazines.

She stressed that from a neuroscience perspective, there is a clear difference between sustained, undivided attention and the more visceral attention that is more a product of reflex.

Magazines were shown to generate a strong right brain response – essentially a highly emotional reaction that is crucial for encoding information deep into memory, ready for recall at a later date.

“What we found was that, contrary to most other media, magazines are so much more differentiated when it came to that right brain response,” she said.

“This strong response is primarily driven by emotional intensity. Emotional intensity is the extent to which an individual is energised, captivated or engrossed by a particular communication. On this measure, magazine advertising outperformed all other media types. The strong emotional response to advertising elicited by magazines adds colour to perceptions of the brand – essentially you are colouring the memory.

This neuro-based evidence demonstrates the brand building strength of magazines to develop deep rooted emotional connections with consumers and we know from the work of Binet and Field that brand building is important when it comes to long term brand health.

See below for her presentation slides.

Check out all the pictures from Spark here.

If you’d like any further information on any of the Spark North presentations, contact hello@magnetic.media