Super Bowl 50: 7 ways adverts are designed to manipulate you

Advertisers are shelling out $5 million for a 30-second slot at the Super Bowl 50 on Sunday.

CBS president Les Moonves said that some movie-makers, in the days running up to the game, put in huge bids of up to $10 million to get in front of the eyes of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

So it's not surprising that those same advertisers are keen to make the most of that expensive air time.

Many of them are employing increasing ingenious psychological techniques to win over viewers.

We asked Heather Andrew, CEO of consumer neuro-research specialists Neuro-Insight, to tell us how brands are maximising the impact of their Super Bowl ad time.

Celebrities don't always work with viewers. But they can be very effective when the celebrity has a strong connection to the brand.

The Mini Super Bowl advert features tennis great Serena Williams, soccer star Abby Wambach, the rapper T-Pain, baseball giant Randy Johnson, the skateboarder Tony Hawk and the actor Harvey Keitel.

All of them have one thing in common: they own, have owned, or have some connection to Minis.

In the Mini advert, the tagline "Defy labels" appears before the end of the advert.

This is a signal to the a brain that that a series of events has come to a close, so it takes a second or so to collate and file away what it has just seen. During thistime it is relatively unreceptive to new information.

If the Mini logo appeared after the tagline, the brain might forget it. In this case, the Mini car has been clearly visible throughout the advert.

"As the brain follows the narrative it can hardly fail to pick up on the brand around which it revolves," Andrew said.

Pokémon's debut Super Bowl advert features real kids to try and inspire high levels of personal relevance, a scientific term for a brain response that what it is watching has a place in our own world.

Andrew said that this drives "memory encoding", when we log something in our brain as important because it is relevant to us on a personal level.

A strong narrative, where each scene links to the next, and fast-paced music help this process.

"The Pokémon brand itself is likely to be well stored into memory through the final scenes which clearly allude to its iconic universe," Andrew said.

Narrative devices have long been used by advertisers to hook viewers.

Pokémon gets it, but Honda doesn't quite, Andrew said.

"From the start of the ad the truck is woven into the storyline, but ad’s storyline doesn’t benefit from any evolving narrative development," she said.

Our brains only remember the information that we need to make sense of something. The means repeated scenes of singing sheep become more forgetable the more they go on.

Doritos asked people to create their own Super Bowl ad concepts with the winner to be voted on by the public.

One of the finalists, Swipe Right, employs several of the other psychological techniques discussed. The Tinder concept is likely to have personal relevance for the audience and the Doritos pack is features in many of the scenes of the advert, which reinforces its place in the viewer's memory.

It also uses a pattern of behaviour - swiping left - that the brain can hook on to and follow through to its resolution with the final swipe right.

Andrew said that the second Doritos finalist, Doritos Dogs, is a great example of how to drive memory encoding using a puzzle.

"The problem – how the dogs gain access to the shop and its Doritos – is laid out right from the start, providing an immediate ‘hook’ for the brain," she said.

The viewer watches the rest of the advert to find out how the puzzle is solved.

The brand is also key to that first moment, ensuring that audiences are likely to encode it into memory.

Humour can trigger a positive emotional response in the viewer that reinforces good associations with a brand, Andrew said.

In another Doritos option, Ultrasound, the advertisers risk the memory of the brand being stored alongside a negative emotion, because of the annoyance the mother shows when she throws the Doritos across the room.

"There’s also a risk that the computer-generated images of the baby are likely to trigger withdrawal, because the brain often exhibits a strong negative response to human visuals that are on the borderline of ‘real and unreal’," Andrew said.