Advertising doesn't work the way you think it does

Sophisticated people have a sophisticated understanding of advertising. They think modern advertisements don't try to rationally or logically persuade us to buy products. No, they work by manipulating our emotions, creating a subconscious association between their product and some positive emotion or idea. This theory is popular, but it is wrong. Not only does advertising not typically work in this emotion-based way, I will argue that it never works this way.

My argument is based on some fundamental facts about the human mind, and by the end of this video, I think you'll be convinced. However, to do that, I need to lay out the theory, summarize a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, explain one of the most important ideas in the history of psychology in about 30 seconds, introduce an alternative theory of how advertising works, show a clip from the television show *Mad Men*, explain the 1919 experiment that confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity, and demonstrate how that illustrates that the original theory of advertising was attractive but wrong. Then I will pull it all together in the end. So let's get started. The commonly accepted theory of advertising that I mentioned earlier is known as emotional inception. The term was coined by Kevin Simler and was inspired by the 2010 movie *Inception*.

In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio uses some sci-fi technology to enter people's dreams while they're asleep and implant ideas into their subconscious minds. The main objective is to sneak into one guy's mind through his dreams and implant the idea that he should dissolve his father's energy conglomerate. As a side note, they possess this incredible ability to plant ideas in people's minds, but instead of using it to, say, stop a war or something significant, they use it to weaken one major corporation so that another can make more money. Whatever. Obviously, some advertisements, especially older ones, try to make an explicit, rational argument in favor of their product.

Our toothache medicine is fast-acting. More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. However, the emotional inception theory suggests that most modern advertising isn't rational in that way; it’s emotional. The ads don't contain any actual information.

They try to plant in people's minds a simple thought, like, "If I smoke Camel cigarettes, I'll be cool. I'll be a cool camel with a human body." The television show "Mad Men" is about 1960s advertising executives who drink alcohol at lunch and refuse to acknowledge their own trauma from fighting in the Korean War. They never use this term "emotional inception," but the whole show is built on this exact theory. For example, there are these executives from Kodak who go into a meeting assuming that the advertisers they are hiring to sell their circular slide projector will find some way to tout the technology in the product.

So, have you figured out a way to work the wheel into it? We know it's hard because wheels aren't really seen as exciting technology, even though they are the original. But the main character in the show, Don Draper, gently dismisses this idea and instead suggests an emotional approach. Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there's the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. Then he tells this whole long story about his mentor in the field of advertising, who’s named Teddy.

You don't have to worry about that. The point is that Don is going to recommend that they sell their product by creating an emotional connection between the product and the idea of personal nostalgia. Because this is a dramatic television show, Don makes the pitch for the advertising campaign using the product itself, the slide projector, along with photos of his own family. This is the end of Season One, so by this point, the audience knows that Don's hubris, extramarital affairs, and alcoholism have destroyed his marriage and his relationship with his children. However, he also speaks about a deeper bond with the product.

Nostalgia. It's delicate but potent. Sweetheart, Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

This device isn't a spaceship; it's a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we're going, where we ache to go again.

It's not called the wheel; it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: round and around, back home again—to a place where we know we are loved.

To a place where we know we are loved. They are going to create an emotional connection, and then this guy cries. Good luck at your next meeting. This is all classic emotional inception theory, but as appealing as it is, good luck at your next meeting.

In the next few minutes, I aim to persuade you that the emotional inception theory is a myth. Emotional inception does not occur. First, note that this theory is entirely Pavlovian. In 1897, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had all these dogs, and he said to them, "Dogs, I'm going to strap you into this absurd 19th-century contraption to measure how much saliva you produce. I am going to ring a bell and then feed you."

And then he would ring a bell and feed the dogs. The dog said, "Woof!" After a few repetitions of this, Pavlov would ring the bell, and the dogs would produce saliva whether they received food or not. Pavlov would say, "Thanks, dogs! Together we just invented classical conditioning, but only I'm going to get the Nobel Prize." And he did.

The Emotional Inception Theory suggests that advertisers do essentially the same thing. Just as Pavlov trained his dogs to associate the ringing of a bell with food, advertisers train us to associate, for example, energy drinks with very unsafe behavior and a sense of adventure. However, if you stop and think about it, this theory paints human beings as incredibly irrational. The dogs that Pavlov was feeding 130 years ago were quite rational; when the dogs were being trained, they were actually given food.

But according to the emotional inception theory, advertisers are able to train us without giving us anything. It would be one thing if they gave us a Red Bull and then let us actually ride a motorcycle, but advertisements just show us a picture of someone else riding a motorcycle. When you think about it, this theory suggests that someone we don't know or trust can essentially hypnotize us into desiring energy drinks just by showing us some images, all without our permission. Of course, it is true that there's been an enormous amount of economic and psychological research demonstrating human irrationality. However, it would be nice if there were an alternative theory that could explain these advertisements—perhaps even explain them better—without portraying humans as staggeringly irrational.

Well, there is. To illustrate this alternative theory of advertising, I'm going to read an Onion headline. The Onion is a satirical newspaper. The headlines and articles are jokes.

Here is a headline from 2018: "Beer Aisle Scan, for Something a Whole Friend Won't Mock." That's just good. I don't even have to read you the article; that's how brilliant of a headline it is.

The point is, for a lot of things, we’re not just buying them for what they can do for us. We’re buying them for what they say about us to other people. The alternative theory of advertising that I’m going to propose in a few seconds agrees with emotional inception theory that advertisers do create associations, arbitrary connections between some product and some idea. But according to this theory, what happens next is that we choose to buy those products as a way of purposefully communicating to other people something about ourselves. These days, I’m just an old man college professor.

But long ago, in a time of much more hair, I was a graduate student in England. Almost all of my friends were other students. It was a very fancy school. We all studied very hard, and at the end of the day, we'd go to a pub and drink a dark ale.

Usually, we would drink one or two beers, and then we would go home at a reasonable hour and go to sleep so that we could wake up the next morning and go to the library. But in England at that time, and I assume still today, there was this drink called Strongbow. Now, Strongbow is not beer; it's hard apple cider. It's basically apple juice that gets you drunk.

It does not taste good, but it's easy to drink a lot of it quickly. One night, when our friend Lindsay showed up with a 24-pack of Strongbow, it communicated something without her having to say anything. Just the fact that she brought this product let us know, "Oh, this girl's here to party." Sometimes you want to come across to other people as sophisticated, and other times, you want to come across as fun. The idea behind this theory is that advertisers associate their product with a particular concept; in this case, wild partying. According to this theory, when we see the product, the idea of wild partying pops into our heads, and we are emotionally drawn to buy the product. However, this theory suggests that we rationally choose to buy the product in order to associate ourselves with that idea.

I'm calling this the Social Connotation Theory of Advertising. I'm borrowing the term "connotation" from John Stuart Mill, who, 180 years ago, published a system of logic in which he used the term "connotative" to refer to names that communicate additional information. You don't have to remember any of that. All that matters is that, according to this theory, the job of the advertiser is easy. With emotional inception, the advertiser has to be like Leonardo DiCaprio, sneaking into our minds and manipulating our emotions.

But according to this theory, all the advertiser has to do is throw it out there that, hey, this signals that. Then we choose to use those signals and language however we see fit. Also, Leonardo DiCaprio only agrees to do the inception and get the energy conglomerate dissolved because Mr. Saito promises to get Leo's criminal record cleared so that he can go back to see his children. However, if Leo can leave, implant ideas in people's minds, why doesn't he just implant the idea of pardoning him in the mind of the governor or something? How can Saito get him pardoned, but Leo himself, who has the power of inception, can't?

We are now almost ready to present the actual argument that shows this theory is false and that this theory is correct. However, before we prepare that argument, there are still two ingredients that are missing. First, there is the indisputable fact regarding the social connotation theory that buying things is a public act. You may have heard the term "conspicuous consumption." It was coined by the economist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book, "The Theory of the Leisure Class."

Who is the leisure class? We are. Veblen pointed out that the Industrial Revolution created a new class of people who were not as wealthy as royalty but nonetheless had enough money to engage in consumption. This refers to the acquisition and use of conspicuous goods—items that are visible to other people, in contrast to inconspicuous consumption. He needed to coin this term because, prior to that moment in history, this phenomenon did not exist.

Really, really rich people had been showing off for a long time. However, the idea that masses—millions of people—had enough money to buy items just to communicate aspects of themselves was genuinely new. The Industrial Revolution, in particular, was a significant turning point. Okay, so there's one last ingredient in the argument recipe. For social connotation theory to work, it's not enough for Lindsay to know in her own mind that "Strongbow" means, you know, to turn up, to get lit, to go carousing, to overindulge, to whoop it up; that's not sufficient.

If her purchase of that product is going to communicate something about her to the rest of us, then we also need to understand that Strongbow signifies those things. You know, Strongbow means a party, a beano, a hoolihoo. This is all real slang, folks. I know it. I know the slang.

And actually, that's not even enough. In order for her to use Strongbow to communicate something about herself, she has to know that we know that Strongbow means those things. It's not enough for her to know something about Strongbow and for us to know something about Strongbow; she has to know something about what we know about Strongbow. On top of that, in order for us to realize that she's using the drink to communicate something to us, we have to know that she knows that we know that Strongbow means "crunk time" or whatever—I'm running out of slang. And maybe this chain of us knowing that they know that we know that they know that we know—maybe this cycle of knowledge of each other's knowledge goes on forever. In academic philosophy, this is called common knowledge. It goes back at least to David Lewis's seminal 1969 book, "Convention." You don't have to remember that; you just need to know that in order for this theory to work, the idea that Strongbow cider means or is associated with wild partying needs to be out there in society, and we have to know that it's out there in society. This will end up being very important to the demonstration that the emotional inception theory is a myth, which is going to happen—the demonstration is coming in about 30 seconds.

But first, I think the way I've been presenting things so far is slightly misleading. Really, there are all different sorts of advertisements. Some ads do present straightforward information about their products, while others seem to contain virtually no information at all. Of course, many actual advertisements do multiple things at the same time. However, one of the most common types of advertisement—perhaps the most common type these days—is what I'm going to call the association ad. In these advertisements, it’s clear that the advertiser is trying to get you to associate their product with a particular idea.

And it seems clear that the Emotional Inception Theory and the Social Connotation Theory are really just competing explanations for this specific subspecies of advertisement. Okay, so how can we choose between these two competing theories? Well, in science, perhaps the best way to choose between two theories of the same phenomenon is to use both of those theories to generate predictions and then see which predictions turn out to be true. For example, with gravity, Isaac Newton was like, "Gravity is a force of attraction between all bodies." Oh no, here comes the Bubonic Plague.

While we're all quarantining, I'll invent calculus. And 200 years later, Albert Einstein was like, "Shavit Newton, massive objects warp space-time. Gravity is not a force of attraction; it's just a name for the bending of space-time."

How are we going to choose between these two theories? If Einstein is right, then we would expect that light traveling past a very large object will curve due to the warping of space-time. And you know what's pretty big? The Sun. The problem is that the Sun is so bright that we can't see right next to it, where its gravity is so strong that we would be able to observe the light from distant stars being curved.

But Einstein was like, "If we observe the sun during a solar eclipse, when the moon is blocking most of the sun's light, we will be able to measure light curving." Look, that's the best German accent I've got. And that's what we needed: a prediction. There was a solar eclipse coming up in 1914, so we could observe the sun during that solar eclipse and test Einstein's theory.

But then this guy killed this guy. And so these guys went to war against these guys. Everyone was too busy fighting World War I to observe the solar eclipse, so they had to wait for another solar eclipse in 1919. Oh, yeah, the light is curving.

That's exactly what you would expect, based on Einstein's theory. So, Newton, how do you like them apples? Now, we can do this exact thing with these two theories. They each generate a prediction, and we see which prediction turns out to be right.

If the emotional inception theory is correct, then we would expect to find association ads in basically all of the places where advertising occurs: billboards, television commercials, bus stop benches, internet pop-ups, direct mail, door tags, and those ads at the top of Google searches that are designed to look like search results but are actually paid advertisements. If creating the association between the product and the idea truly does impact our brains through inception, then that should be equally effective in all of these different locations. However, if the social connotation theory is accurate, we would anticipate finding association ads only in certain places. Why is that?

Well, because social connotation theory relies on common knowledge, and common knowledge only occurs here in some of these places. With a Super Bowl advertisement, it's not just that millions of people see the advertisement; those millions of people also know that everybody else sees the advertisement. That's common knowledge.

But with an internet pop-up ad, the advertiser can pay for the same number of people—millions of people—to see the ad. However, none of those individuals know how many others are seeing the ad, creating a lack of common knowledge. According to social connotation theory, associative ads only work when we can be assured, through common knowledge, that others will understand what we are communicating about ourselves. Therefore, according to this theory, these types of ads are effective only in advertising contexts where there is common knowledge.

Okay, so our two theories generate alternative predictions, and now we just need to look and see which one is correct. Do association ads appear in all the different places where there is advertising? Or is it true that association ads only appear in those advertising types that generate common knowledge? Well, let's look at the door hanger advertisements that I receive at my house all the time. They are always ads packed with information for something like a house for sale, air conditioning repair, or similar services.

It's never an ad for Coca-Cola or Nike. This is exactly what the social connotation theory predicts. When I go home and find this piece of paper hanging on my door, I can't be confident that all of my friends also received the same piece of paper on their doors. Therefore, this type of ad does not generate common knowledge and cannot be used to communicate things about ourselves. Insofar as advertisers understand their craft, they won't use this form of advertising for association ads.

The advertising format that generates the most common knowledge is television commercials appearing during huge sporting events like the Super Bowl or the World Cup. That's because when you see one of those advertisements, you can be confident that millions of other people have also seen them, and those people also know that you've seen those advertisements. So the next time you watch one of those sporting events, look and see if, as the social connotation theory predicts, a disproportionate number of those ads are association ads as opposed to some other type. The results will be overwhelming. The idea at the heart of social connotation theory is that for many of us, much of the time, buying something is like waving our hands in the air and saying, "Look at me, I'm this type of person; form your opinion of me based on this product."

But here's the thing. If someone is responding to an advertisement by purchasing a product to communicate something about themselves, then they are being rational. It's not like they're being emotionally manipulated or anything like that. Speaking of irrational, apparently when the van that they're sleeping in during the first level dream falls off the bridge, it affects the gravity in the second level dream with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the hotel. Okay, but if gravity transfers between dream levels, then why doesn't the zero gravity in the second level dream transfer over to the third level dream in the snow fortress?

To really bring things to a climax, the two theories that we are comparing not only yield predictions about where we see association ads; they also yield predictions about which types of products we see association ads for. Social scientists have shown that some products, like the car we drive or anything related to the music we listen to, communicate more about our identities than other products, such as dish soap. Now, the Emotional Inception Theory predicts that we would see association ads for all different types of products because emotional manipulation and emotional connections are just as possible for Q-tips as they are for sneakers. However, Social Connotation Theory predicts that we would see association ads only for those products that other people can see us using. And that is exactly what we find.

We see tons of association ads for beer, soft drinks, cars, and shoes. However, we only encounter information ads—if we see any ads at all—for detergent, dish soap, or bedsheets. I mean, there is a $104 billion market for home bedding. But have you ever, in your life, seen a single advertisement for bedsheets? Additionally, it is clearly established that you have to be hooked into the dream machine in order to be an active participant in the next level of dreaming.

But who do we find in Level 4? Or Saito, who was never hooked in Level 3? Hi, it's me in my office. If you have a long enough attention span to make it this far in the video, then you might be interested in the book that I'm writing. If you click the link in the description below and put in your email address, I will email you when the book is ready.

I promise I will not send you a million emails. I will not sell your email address to spammers. All you will get is an email from me when the book is for sale, and I will pick some of those emails, and those people will get free copies of the book. The ideas in this video were heavily influenced by Kevin Simler, linked to his website in the description, and also by Jonah Berger from the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks to Professor Adam Bradley for putting this topic together.