Who won the Mirror?

Have you ever wondered which ads placed in the national newspapers are the most effective at engaging readers? Newsline has partnered with Lumen Research to find out.

What better way to start the day than with a big, grease-ridden blob of meat, carbs and cheese? Exactly! Which is why McDonald’s has won this week’s Who won the Mirror? with a breakfast offering too artery-clogging to refuse.

McDonald’s’ morning McMuffin ad/possibly the most depressed-looking muffin ever (see below) made sure that 80% of Mirror readers’ hearts were racing (with high blood pressure) and pores flowing with greasy anticipation for a whopp(er)ing 4.3 seconds – two whole seconds above Lumen’s engagement norm (or, alternatively, the time it takes for me to eat six McNuggets).

However, apparently it’s not just first-world gluttony and a love for salt and saturated fat that made the ad such a success…we may have been primed to associate breakfast with McDonald’s.

Lumen founder Mike Follett explains that priming is a non-conscious type of human memory concerned with perceptual identification of words, ideas and objects; it refers to activating certain representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task.

“For example, a person who sees the word “morning” will be slightly faster to recognise the word “breakfast”,” said Follett, who explained that this occurs because morning and breakfast are closely associated in memory.

“In this case, the time of day acted as a prime for the respondents in the morning session – when respondents saw an advert for breakfast that was associated with their current situation, it led to increased engagement with this contextually similar advert.”

Personally, I’d rather stick to my Waitrose free-range organic goose eggs Florentine with wild smoked Alaskan salmon, a twist of essential lemon and a crack of essential black pepper, thanks.