This article was originally published in NZ Marketing Magazine.

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NZ’s top 10 ads of the quarter

1. ASB: Ben & Amy [No change in rankings]  

2. ANZ: Sharma Family [No change in rankings]  

3. One NZ: Let’s get connected [+1 place]

4. Tux: Feeding the kiwi in all our dogs [-1 place]

5. KFC: The power of KFC [+2 places]  

6. Turners: Tina from Turners [+2 places]  

7. PAK’nSAVE: Stickman [-1 places]  

8. Genesis: George and family [-3 places]  

9. NZ Post: Festive Fibs [returns to list]

10. McDonalds: Summer Driver [returns to list]

A few times a year, we ask people, “What's your favourite ad?”. It's a tough test. We give them no context and no market category. We don’t narrow it down to the funniest or cleverest ad, and we don't ask about effectiveness. It’s purely and simply a question of what comes to mind.  

This means that, for an ad to be chosen, it first must grab someone’s attention. We don’t live in a stimulus-deprived world, so capturing attention is no mean feat. Marketers have been focused on attention for a while now and, specifically, on how to measure it. But, are we analysing the right things?  

Time to pay attention

Big hitter brands like Unilever, Diageo and Nestlé actively use attention metrics to measure communications. It's an approach backed by academia, which has demonstrated how measuring attention can improve business performance and profitability.  

But there's still work to do. Measuring attention is a growing field, and recent studies have found that there's less consistency between methods than expected. And there’s no point in asking people, we don't know why we pay attention to some things and not others. Clearly, there's still work to do in measurement, but there’s also work to do upstream – understanding our humanness and what dictates attention.  

What does this mean for marketers?  

If we don’t understand the human drivers of attention, we rely on measuring the output and risk overlooking the input. That's because attention isn't a conscious choice – cognitive science tells us so. Our attention is, in fact, largely automatic and unconscious. This is because our brains constantly filter vast amounts of information, meaning we can only focus on one thing at a time.

People pay attention based on five characteristics: novelty, personal relevance, incongruence, familiarity and a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik Effect.

Novelty is key because attention is an evolutionary survival strategy. We notice the unusual – whether it bites or delights you. The One NZ Let’s Get Connected ad ranked third in the rankings and grabbed attention because of the novelty of its opening scene “Hello Cow”. The scene sparks surprise and curiosity and piques our hard-wired desire to find out more. It's why we initially stick with the ad, then the great storytelling does the rest.  

Personal relevance is a strong trigger for attention – who doesn’t hear their name across a noisy room? NZ Post’s Festive Fibs ad wins attention because of the personal relevance. During the pre-Christmas period, people relate to secrecy and minor deceits linked to the anxiety of being caught.  

Incongruence happens when we see things that don’t match our expectations, causing our brain to slow down. Show someone the word 'red' coloured in blue, and it takes longer to process than when it’s coloured red. Tina from Turners grabs our attention cause this dancing, whacky character is incongruent with our image of a car salesperson. But that's not the only reason it grabs our attention.

It's also because of the ad's familiarity. To reduce our cognitive load, our brains are hard-wired to filter the noise and focus on what’s familiar. Our minds have a finite capacity to pay attention to more than one thing at a time – so familiar things often win the attention game.  

Zeigarnik Effect: The ASB Ben and Amy ads benefit from familiarity, too. However, their ongoing storytelling also leverages the Zeigarnik Effect – our tendency to remember unfinished business. Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that waiters could recall unpaid orders in detail but forgot them once paid. It’s why cliffhangers work. We're hard-wired to want closure because loose ends might be bad for us. The Zeigarnik Effect helps Ben and Amy, who hold the top ranking because their story remains unfinished.  

Ultimately, the best favourite ads tap into the unique cognitive characteristics that influence our attention. So, if we want to design for attention rather than just measure it, marketers must invest in understanding humans more deeply. The unconscious drivers of the attention economy. Our brains.

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