Immersion Drives Sales

Immersion creates sales.

Humor doesn't create them. Neither does celebrity cameos. And not cute dogs or babies (sorry to break that one to you . . .) 

At Immersion, we've been studying brain processes for 20+ years to determine why consumers are driven to action from ads. You can read more about that here. 

Once we identified the neurologic signals that predict when people will buy, we developed a platform so anyone can measure neurologic immersion in real time from a smartwatch.

People were interested, and many were skeptical.  We're scientists, we like skeptical people.

Enter BBDO. Years ago, one of the world's largest advertising agencies read the peer-reviewed science we had done showing that that Immersion accurately predicted individual behaviors. They wanted to know if Immersion would predict market outcomes from advertising. And, they were skeptical too.

To see if we really knew our stuff, BBDO provided us with 18 commercials to test. There were three candy bar commercials, Cesar dog food, AT&T phone services, Visa credit cards and two beers - Guinness and Bud Light.  Like good skeptics, BBDO made us work blind. Their clients ranked ads by sales bumps for each commercial, but BBDO withheld this information from us.

After measuring Immersion in 60 people watching the commercials, we sent the neurologic rankings to BBDO. The result?

Immersion correctly identified the commercials that produced the largest bump in sales with 83% accuracy. We were able to predict which ads had effectively increased sales for the brands using only brain responses, not liking, not familiarity. 

So how do we relate immersion scores to sales bumps?

We used the BBDO data to estimate how an increase in immersion is related to an increase in sales . . . AKA to create statistical model of elasticity - if you're science-y.

This analysis showed that a 10% increase in immersion would result in a 5% increase in sales. Pretty amazing. As Andy Wilson, Head of Strategy Asia BBDO, said,  “The Immersion data was better at predicting in-market performance of content than any self-reported measures.”

And – our client data over the last five years has confirmed this elasticity.

Content creators should be skeptical when audiences say they "like" an ad because liking simply does not predict markets. Same with measures of attention such as clicks. Attention does not move markets, emotion resonance that is responsible for most of the variation in immersion does.

Simply "liking" an ad because it's funny or it featured a particularly funny Timothy Chalamet cameo doesn't predict if people will buy. 

The human brain is complicated. And lazy.

Liking things is easy but taking action requires more. If you want to drive consumers to take action, you need to do earn more than their laughter. You need to immerse them in your content. 

Immersion gives you the power to quickly and easily optimize your content. And a low cost and scalability allows you to iterate ad edits to maximize moments of immersion. 

When you understand these moments - you can more easily put your call-to-action or logo at the height of your audience's immersion to create more sales. 

Do people like your ad? Hmmmmmm. The right question is whether it has immersion . . .