Current Topic: Advertising

The Meditation App That Cracked TV Advertising's Code

Picture this: You're watching your favorite show when a commercial for Calm, the meditation app, comes on. But instead of jumping straight into product features, something unusual happens. The screen shows a simple instruction: "Take a deep breath in... hold it... now breathe out."

You actually do it. For those three seconds, you're not scrolling your phone or thinking about tomorrow's meeting. You're present. You're paying attention. That simple moment just increased your chance of remembering the Calm brand by 500%.

This isn't marketing magic. It's science. And the real shocker? These mindfulness cues don't just work for meditation brands, they boost recall even for completely unrelated products. It's about to change how you think about TV advertising forever.

Why Your Brain Falls for the Casting Trick

In my neighborhood there are two coffee shops. The first serves only white, middle-aged businessmen in suits. The second buzzes with customers of all ages, ethnicities, and styles. Without reading a single menu, which shop do you think offers more variety?

Your brain just made a snap judgment. And it probably got it wrong.

This isn't about coffee shops. It's about a fascinating quirk in how we process information. When we see different types of people using a product, we automatically assume the product must cater to different types of needs. It's logical, intuitive, and an interesting tool for marketing.

Stanford researchers call this the Variety Perception Effect. And smart marketers are already using it to make their brands look bigger without spending a dime on product development.

Imagine walking down the cleaning aisle and spotting the newest plug-in room freshener with packaging adorned with scrumptious looking cinnamon rolls. You can almost smell it, right? That’s not just your imagination, it’s a powerful psychological phenomenon at play. 

A recent study by Sharma and Estes (2024) reveals that pictures of scented objects can actually make us "smell" them in our minds, influencing how we evaluate and choose products. Olfactory imagery can play a vital role in consumer decision making.

There’s a heated debate among advertisers about the role of attention in ad effectiveness. More specifically, the interplay between duration and frequency causes quite the controversy.

On the one hand, there’s the faith of ‘Total Time Hypothesis’. Its proponents argue that advertising effectiveness grows linearly with the amount of time devoted to that ad. So the more precious seconds of viewer attention, the better. This resembles the classical view of ad effectiveness, and it favors duration over frequency.

Go back to the last video ad that caught your eye. Was it the creative that stopped you from scrolling? Was it the message? Or perhaps it was the way it made you feel? While you might know why you liked it, your brain and body were telling a different story through subtle signals you weren't even aware of - small expressions on your face and tiny changes in your skin's sweat response.