How Television Advertisements Hijack the Brain

By Cori Russell on March 21, 2012

 

Now that I’m an adult, with the power to make my own decisions, I have decided not to focus on a job while in school. That has led to me not having money for a cable bill, so I have had to get creative in order to entertain myself. Sure, when I did have cable I had hobbies outside of watching TV, but it was the one activity I could always rely on. It was my buddy on a rainy day and my conversation starter at school the next morning.

Where I’ve grown up, in the United States, almost everyone has at least one TV. I can’t think of one family I know personally that doesn’t own one. I’ve had one in my house my whole life.  There are more televisions produced a year than babies in the U.S. are born! This booming source of communal connectivity has changed the way we function in our daily lives. We are kept up to date with 24-hour live news coverage from around the world. We are happily and easily entertained, placated, by the hundreds of different channels we can choose from.

These networks that we turn to daily make money by the billions from sponsors’ advertisements. From the corporation’s point of view, we are watching TV only for the ads. They dish out as much money as they can to utilize the most effective way of making their products profitable, and even tend to sneak them into the regular show. The problem with this is that these corporations are using our money from the products we buy as bait to earn more money. For example, TV companies put out ads to sell more TVs. We are being pressured to buy a product that is used more than 30% of the time to tell us to buy more products. How has this all become so profitable? The power of the mind.

When we watch an advertisement of a woman happily spraying air freshener in her bedroom, our brains may elicit the same happy response, even if we are just sitting at home. We are being conditioned to feel happy when we see certain products. So when we buy a TV, we are essentially buying an electronic machine that conditions us to consciously and subconsciously want, and crave, certain items. Companies put immense effort, time, and funding into studies and experiments designed to test the most effective advertising strategies. A New York Times article last month highlighted some of businesses’ most effective marketing techniques. The truth is pretty invasive. Many big companies hire habit analysts to scourge through logs of data associating purchases with individual customers to find out what our shopping habits are so they can hijack our brain’s natural reward system. They rely on a series of “habit loops” to send specific ads out during times when they know a person is likely to go shopping. Their point is to get the customer into a habit of mindlessly shopping at their store as a repeatable customer, a steady stream of income for the company.

So next time you go for that bag of chips, ask yourself: are you really craving some cheesy crunchiness or are you being cued to make that purchase from something you watched on TV?

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