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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 20, 2013

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REAL LIFE NEWS: ADVERTISING SUFFERS IF YOU EAT POPCORN

by Hazed

Go to the movies these days are you are encouraged to buy a vast bucket of popcorn to munch on during the film. But new research shows that eating popcorn makes you less susceptible to advertising.

The study from Cologne University in Germany discovered that when watching ads for new products, people remember the brands by using silent speech, simulating the pronunciation of the new name with their mouths. But if they are chewing then this inner speech is disrupted, so lessening the effect of the advertising.

The researchers asked 96 people to watch a movie which had a sequence of adverts at the start. Half the group was given a never-ending supply of popcorn, while the other half had to make do with a small sugar cube.

The ads were genuine commercials for real products, but they were not familiar to the German participants. A week later they were asked to rate some products, some of which had been featured in the adverts. Those given the sugar cube showed a preference for the products which had been advertised, but the participants eating the popcorn showed no such preference.

The researchers suggest that this shows that the repetition of the brand names, albeit silently, is essential it making them memorable. That makes sense – if you are introduced to a new person, the way to remember their name is to use it several times to fix it in your memory.

But it’s going to give cinema owners a dilemma. They make money from the adverts shown on the screen, but they also rely on sales of popcorn and other refreshments to boost their profits. It looks like they can’t have both. Which will they choose?

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24518203

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