Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [19]
Cingular, too, pops up repeatedly throughout the show, though to a lesser extent. As the host, Ryan Seacrest, repeatedly reminds us, viewers can dial in, or vote for their favorite contestant via text-message, from a Cingular Wireless cell phone—the only carrier that permits Idol voting via text-messaging (text messages from other cell phone providers are evidently discarded, meaning you either have to call in for a fee or forever hold your peace). What’s more, the Cingular logo—which looks like an orange cat splattered on a road—shows up alongside every set of phone and text-messaging numbers shown onscreen.3 And to further cement the relationship between the show and the brand, in 2006 Cingular announced it would begin offering ring tones of live performances from the previous night’s show to download to their mobile phones. The cost: $2.95.4
Of the show’s three main sponsors, Ford is the only advertiser that doesn’t share an actual stage with the contestants. Ford’s $26 million goes only toward traditional thirty-second ad spots (though in 2006 Ford announced that it had hired American Idol Taylor Hicks—the gray-haired guy—to record a relentlessly up-tempo, feel-good song for both TV and radio entitled “Possibilities” to promote the company’s new “Drive On Us” end-of-year sales event). During the show’s sixth season, Ford also produced original music videos featuring the company’s cars which ran during the commercial breaks in each of the final eleven shows and partnered with the American Idol Web site for a weekly sweepstakes promotion.5
What’s with this relentless advertising assault? In part, it can be attributed to advertisers’ calculated end-run against popular new technologies like TiVo, which allows viewers to skip over the TV commercials and watch their favorite shows without interruption. “The shift from programmer-to consumer-controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years,” Jeff Gaspin, the president of NBC Universal Television Group, has been quoted as saying.6 In essence, sponsors are letting us know that it’s futile to hide, duck, dodge, fast-forward, or take an extended bathroom break: they’ll get to us somehow.
But do they? Do all these meticulously planned, shrewdly placed products really penetrate our long-term memory and leave any lasting impression on us at all? Or are they what I like to call “wallpaper” ads—instantly forgettable, the advertising equivalent of elevator Muzak? That’s what the next part of our brain study would find out.
THE SETUP WAS simple. Our four hundred carefully chosen subjects were each fitted with a black, turban-like cap wired with a dozen electrodes that resembled tea candles. Researchers then adjusted and looped the wires over their heads, and finally topped off the ensemble with a pair of viewing goggles. In their SST garb, our study subjects looked like random members of an affable Roswell, New Mexico, cult, or a bunch of participants at a psychic fair.
But there was nothing otherworldly or left-to-chance about this study, the first ever to assess the power (or pointlessness) of this billion-dollar product placement industry. The electrodes had been positioned over specific portions of our subjects’ brains so that from several feet away, behind a pane of glass, the research team could view—and mathematically measure—exactly what their brain waves were doing in real time. Among other things, SST could measure the degree of subjects’ emotional engagement (how interested they were in what they were watching), memory (what parts of what they were watching were penetrating long-term memory), and approach and withdraw (what attracted or repelled them about the visual image). Or in the head