You're ignoring subconscious ad effects, which largely are the main effects that advertisers are seeking to use. You scan quickly over some innocuous-seeming ad for Product-X-that-of-course-you'd-never-ever-buy, and now you are psychologically primed -- the shade of blue in the ad was chosen because it tested best for users who also viewed page Y and whose IP addresses place them in your area -- the ad contained a human face with features, expression, grooming, all chosen to resonate with you in a millisecond as your eye saccade glosses over it. Any text or pricing information was chosen carefully to explicitly prime you.
Then, months or years later when you're on the market for something like Product-X, you absolutely do not even ever remember scanning your eyes over the ad, and yet your eyes are just simply drawn to the product, or when it is mentioned by word of mouth, there is some priming memory to be reinforced, and somehow you just happen to choose Product-X to purchase.
I mean you're just taking it to conspiracy levels now. Priming is indeed a thing but those kinds of associations are very short-lived. I don't know of any priming effect that lasts for months and years or at least I haven't read any study that indicates that.
If advertisers really knew what they were doing there wouldn't be so much advertising spam. They are just blasting the speakers as loudly as they can and then tracking every little thing possible because they think they can optimize the pipeline somehow. There is no science behind any of it.
I'm baffled that you feel this way. I actually worked on some of the science behind it when I was in grad school. Here was one of the well-known projects in the field at that time:
There are also many other kinds of psychological manipulation research. For example, this article from Gamasutra talks about techniques for monetization in games, and this is obviously applicable to many ad formats:
Even just a cursory Google search for whatever popular advertising journals there are, then looking at what articles are in their current issues, turned up some pretty quantitative work on allocating to different media formats:
That one, in the introduction, also links to many other studies specifically about psychological factors contributing to negative ad reactions.
I'm really baffled that you think advertisers do not conduct extremely specific threads of research to determine whether they are getting their money's worth from a certain ad or not.
I don't consider any of this to be remotely like a conspiracy theory -- in fact I thought this was commonly understood to be obviously the case, and I'm very surprised to hear that you feel otherwise.
You can be as baffled as you want. My circle of friends is pretty evenly split between people that buy name brand things and those that couldn't care less about any branded products. So either advertisers have figured out how to target those that are susceptible to their kind of priming or they're shooting in the dark.
Reading the abstracts in order:
> The concept of surprise is central to sensory processing, adaptation,
learning, and attention. Yet, no widely-accepted mathematical theory
currently exists to quantitatively characterize surprise elicited by a stimulus
or event, for observers that range from single neurons to complex
natural or engineered systems. We describe a formal Bayesian definition
of surprise that is the only consistent formulation under minimal axiomatic
assumptions. Surprise quantifies how data affects a natural or artificial
observer, by measuring the difference between posterior and prior
beliefs of the observer. Using this framework we measure the extent to
which humans direct their gaze towards surprising items while watching
television and video games. We find that subjects are strongly attracted
towards surprising locations, with 72% of all human gaze shifts directed
towards locations more surprising than the average, a figure which rises
to 84% when considering only gaze targets simultaneously selected by
all subjects. The resulting theory of surprise is applicable across different
spatio-temporal scales, modalities, and levels of abstraction.
Nothing to do with priming. Novelty seeking is not priming and I would expect this result to be true given what I know about people in general and bits and pieces of evolutionary psychology. Do ads try to be novel? Sure. I guess that is one way to grab attention but I don't see any connection between that and long-term manipulation that you talk about.
> A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper.
Again, tricking someone is not the same as priming them for the long term. This is the same stuff casinos do so catering to short-term heuristics and tricking a person hardly qualifies as what you laid out in your original comment.
> The current study applied a “mixture-amount modeling” statistical approach—used most often in biology, agriculture, and food science—to measure the impact of advertising effort and allocation across different media. The authors of the current paper believe advertisers can use the mixture-amount model to detect optimal advertising-mix allocation changes as a function of their total advertising effort. The researchers demonstrated the use of the model by analyzing Belgian magazine and television data on 34 advertising campaigns for beauty-care brands. The goal is to help advertisers maximize desirable outcomes for campaign recognition and brand interest.
Sounds interesting but is more about optimizing exposure than anything else. No claims about long term cognitive effects and rightfully so.
I don't feel your reply addresses any of my points. For example, you simply list the Itti/Baldi paper's abstract and say that, basically, because the word 'priming' doesn't appear in the abstract means the research has nothing to do with it. That seems incredibly disingenuous to me. The research is directly about predicting where human eyeballs will involuntarily move when presented with certain visual stimuli. If you can't see the direct connection with drawing attention to priming artifacts in an ad, I think it's probably just not possible for us to even converse about the topic at all.
The rest of the reply is similar. Using ctrl-f to search for the word 'priming' in a source doesn't constitute an effort to see how it could be connected to priming.
Then, months or years later when you're on the market for something like Product-X, you absolutely do not even ever remember scanning your eyes over the ad, and yet your eyes are just simply drawn to the product, or when it is mentioned by word of mouth, there is some priming memory to be reinforced, and somehow you just happen to choose Product-X to purchase.