Who won the Sun?
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.
On top of the kind-of-exciting news which emerged this week that human beings are one step closer to exploring Mars, the planet’s marketing team seems to be doing well all round, with the red giant bagging this week’s top spot in Who won the Sun? Oh wait…
Britain’s most dependable chocolate bar (just to clarify – neither made of rock, nor 54.6 million kilometres away) beat off all other celestial competitors in this week’s Sun with an ad for its lovely little balls of honeycomby joy, aka Maltesers.
Standout reached an impressive 88% – 16% above Lumen’s norms – with readers engaging with the ad for an average of 2.8 seconds – a whole second more than the usual time spent for an ad of that size.
The bold heading received a large amount of engagement; however, readers’ attention dwindled the further down the page they read – as shown in the image below.
According to Lumen founder Mike Follett, the success of Mars’ ad can be attributed to ‘mirror neurons’, which can be found in humans, other primates and even some birds.
Mirror neurons fire both when an animal acts and when it observes the same action performed by others. So, the observer mirrors the behaviour as if they were acting.
“In this instance, when you see Jaswant smiling, mirror neurons – found in humans in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, inferior parietal cortex and the primary somatosensory cortex – fire making you feel as though you are smiling yourself,” explains Follett.
“The purpose of mirror neurons is still debated. Some researchers believe that they help develop theory of mind skills by simulating the actions of others, whereas, many cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists believe they are crucial for developing the perception/action coupling found in common coding theory.”
So, whether the ad’s success really is a result of a natural human response, or the simple fact that we just really like Maltesers, I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Free science lesson over and out.