Seducing the Subconscious by Robert Heath

Author:Robert Heath
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781119969006
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-02-03T14:00:00+00:00

10

Emotion and Attention

“All the evidence about ‘emotional appeals in advertising’ shows that their main role is to attract attention”

Erik Du Plessis

The Advertised Mind (2005: 141)

I hope that so far I have managed to build a pretty convincing case for advertising being able to exert an effect on our emotions at low levels of attention, and link this effect to brands. Well, here we encounter a bit of a problem. Some research has shown that a high levels of emotional appeal in communication increases the amount of attention we pay to it.

If this is true of advertising, and many people believe it is, then the case for advertising affecting us emotionally at low levels of attention starts to look shaky. Quite simply, if emotion in communication increases level of attention, then advertisements that incorporate a lot of emotive content are likely to be paid a lot more attention. If this happens, the emotive content will be processed actively and not passively. That punctures the idea that emotion is able to work subconsciously: emotive content would never have the opportunity to influence us at low levels of attention, because it would never be paid low levels of attention.

You'll recall from Kover's research in Chapter 7 that those who work in advertising believe emotive content increases attention. Their reasoning is that creativity is what enables advertising to get attention, and creativity is essentially made up of emotive content, therefore emotive content gets attention. As is often the case, they are right in a way, but wrong in another more important way, and in this chapter I am going to try to get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction.

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