The most effective Super Bowl ad was the Disney ad in which athletes tried to perfect their “I’m going to Disneyworld” quote, commonly spoken by a member of the winning team after the big game. (In case you missed the commercial, AOL has a nice collection of the commercials – the winning Disney: NFL commercial was shown in the 2nd quarter).

According to this fascinating study done by Marco Iacoboni at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, whose team used fMRI to record and analyze the brain waves of a small group of people while they watched on Sunday, Disney had the best ad while Sierra Mist came in 2nd.

This study is interesting not just because we all seem fascinated by the Super Bowl commercial phenomenon but because it demonstrates that recording the brain waves of people and analyzing them with an incredibly fast turn-around is possible. Presumably, you could extend this to do studies on people using web sites as well.

But what do the results really say? Was the Disney commercial the most effective, or did it just pique our interest the most? Are those two things the same?

Yes they are, according to Iacoboni, who equates brain activity with success for the ad. He writes:

“The Disney ad elicited strong responses in orbito-frontal cortex and ventral striatum, two brain regions associated with processing of rewards. Also, the Disney ad induced robust responses in mirror neuron areas, indicating identification and empathy. Further, the circuit for cognitive control, encompassing anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was highly active while watching the Disney ad. We consider all these features positive markers of brain responses to the ad.”

Here’s a shot of that technical jargon in action, illustrating neuron activity in the right posterior inferior frontal gyrus – indicating identification and empathy:

Even so, I would want to see how many people actually go to Disney World as a result of watching the commercial. I know it didn’t change my travel plans in the near-term. But I have to wonder, did it effectively imprint happy thoughts in my head, so that the next time I’m in Florida, I just might be more likely to go?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under Amusing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.