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The Role of Memory In Website Content and Advertising
By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

The primary goal of all advertising, including website content
is to be remembered. No matter what other marketing goal you want
to achieve, if your audience doesn't remember your presentation,
it is a wasted effort and lost opportunity. All the money spent
on attracting people to your website goes right down the drain
if your content is instantly forgettable. With that in mind it
is hard to believe how little thought is put into creating
content that people will remember.

In order to create content or advertising that people will
remember, we have to understand a little about how memory works.
Professor Daniel Schacter of Harvard University is an expert in
the study of human memory and has written numerous books on the
subject, including 'The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind
Forgets and Remembers'. In this book Schacter describes seven
characteristics of human memory that all marketing people need
to be aware of in order to construct content and advertising
that website audiences will retain.

Transience

Transience refers to the fact that memory degrades over time,
our recollections become generic and what we are left with is a
sense of expectation rather than specific features.

If you overload your website visitors with a shopping list of
features or a series of b-school banalities, you are giving up
the opportunity to make a singular impression on your audience,
especially if the features you are so proud of are mere
duplicates of features offered by your competitors.

You may not remember the specifics of the latest Volvo automobile
advertising campaign but you most likely regard Volvos to be safe,
the primary focus of their long-term marketing efforts. What
Volvo has done is position itself as the manufacturer of safe
cars. This is the position they hold in the minds of the car
buying public. As an advertiser this should be the focus of
their campaigns. If they for some reason decide to change their
approach, they stand to confuse and alienate their audience.

Whether you are dealing with website content or webmedia
presentations the focus should be on establishing your primary
marketing message in your audience's minds. If that singular
message gets lost in a jungle of corporate platitudes and
extraneous specifications then the chance of your audience
retaining your message is greatly reduced.

To deal with this problem, we suggest clients think in terms of
advertising campaigns rather than just an ad, and program-style
linear narrative presentations rather than feature and
specification-based information. In our own recent marketing
campaign (http://www.mrpwebmedia/ads) we were able to present
eighteen different issues, each in an individual presentation,
but all with a central unifying theme. People may not remember
the individual issues, but they will remember the central
unifying theme of the campaign; most importantly they'll
remember who we are and what we stand for.

Absent-mindedness

Absent-mindedness is the failure to pay attention when receiving
information resulting in no memory, or the inability to recall
information buried deep in memory because of missing contextual
references.

The sheer volume of demand for attention and information that
people deal with on a daily basis, what author and information
architect, Saul Wurman refers to as "Information Anxiety," makes
it impossible for people to absorb everything they think they
should, or even want to, retain. Our brains automatically
filter-out extraneous data and retain only what is important or
relevant. As a result people are more likely to develop a general
familiarity with a brand rather than an in-depth recollection of
details.

Recognizing that your audience is only going to retain the core
message you are delivering if it is relevant and meaningful
requires that you give up the immaterial and concentrate on the
essence of what you need to say.

You also must find ways to break through the mental barriers
people erect in order to block-out useless content. A website
dominated by large amounts of text requires a huge commitment of
interest in order for someone to pay attention and commit your
content to memory. The use of web-audio and web-video requires
less of a mental commitment from your audience and at the same
time provides the sensory, emotional, and contextual references
that aid in memory recall.

Blocking

Blocking is a familiar phenomenon most people have experienced.
We recognize a person and can tell you almost everything about
that individual except his or her name. Unlike transience where
the name has faded from memory, blocking refers to a situation
where the knowledge is in memory but the appropriate reference
or association has not been accessed to stimulate recall.

To overcome blocking people must access mental associations that
are emotional, contextual, or sensory. Emotional triggers are an
adaptive imperative for our survival as a species and
advertisements and presentations that reflect common emotional
experiences will leave indelible impressions. By framing your
presentation in some familiar context, you will provide viewers
with an association that aids in memory recall. The addition of
sensory mnemonics like a distinctive voice-over and an on-screen
visual character, provide assistance in memory recall.

Misattribution

We often remember some information or experience but attribute
it to the wrong source. This 'unconscious transference' occurs
when a feature or benefit is too similar to a competitor's, or
when the presentation lacks any distinctive association,
reference, mnemonic, or emotional impact.

Sometimes the presentation of information is highly relevant
and is therefore embedded in memory but the source of that
information is considered extraneous and is therefore dismissed
as inconsequential. When delivering information to a website
audience, it is important to create presence, and establish
credibility, in order to link the message to the messenger.

By using web-video and web-audio to present information, you
create the opportunity to establish a memorable personality for
your organization. Presenting information as 'programming' rather
than just information provides context and character, both of
which help build a memory inducing corporate personality.

Suggestibility

Suggestibility occurs when information learned from an outside
source is attributed to personal experience. Vivid mental images,
intense emotional reactions, or suggestive questions that target
emotional soft spots can trigger this type of false memory.

Research suggests that suggestibility for false memories can be
enhanced if an audience is instructed to expect results that are
plausible. The combination of suggestibility and misattribution
can result in people having memories of things that never took
place.

In a research paper entitled, 'Make My Memory: How Advertising
Can Change Our Memories of the Past,' Kathryn A. Braun of Harvard
Business School, Rhiannon Ellis of the University of Pittsburgh,
and Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of Washington, present
evidence that certain types of suggestive advertising can create
false memories.

As a basis for the research they used a Disney advertising
campaign, 'Remember the Magic,' that featured a family enjoying
themselves at Disney World and included a scene of a child
shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. The researchers wanted to know
if such an autobiographical ad could create a false memory of
shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, when in fact it never happened.

In order to test the validity of their theory, they created an
ad that prompted people to remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny
on a childhood trip to Disneyland, an event that could never have
occurred since Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character and would
not have been seen at a Disney theme park. Despite the fact that
this event could never have taken place, a significant number of
participants in the study were able to recall the experience of
shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Bias

New experiences are filtered through past experiences and
pre-existing belief systems. Often when people with opposing
political points-of-view watch the same political debate on
television, they will come away with totally different opinions
on who won the debate based on their pre-existing bias.

New experiences are filtered through our past experiences and
color our interpretation of current events. Advertisers often
use images and nostalgic icons of the past in order to create a
positive context for interpreting new product offerings. On the
other hand, political campaigns often use the same kind of
technique in reverse to generate negative attitudes toward an
opponent or a divisive polarizing issue.

Memories are not static imprints of the past, but rather
reconstituted constructs filtered through an ever-evolving
personal history of learned knowledge and emotional experiences.

Persistence

Emotionally intense experiences, especially negative ones, will
leave longer-lasting impressions than emotionally neutral
experiences. It is important for us to remember traumatic events
so that we learn from them and don't repeat them; it is an innate
survival mechanism.

Advertisers can use this to their advantage by reminding people
of negative situations that could be avoided with the use of
their product. These types of advertisements can be used for
health care, personal grooming, and financial services and
products.

On the positive side, we can see from the previously mentioned
Disney 'Remember the Magic' campaign that positive emotional
experiences can also be used to create positive attitudes in a
properly constructed campaign.

The main difference between positive and negative persistent
memory is the recall of details. Persistent negative memories
tend to be richer in detail whereas positive persistent memories
tend to be more generic, a fact that can be used as we have
discussed previously to create false memories or what is more
euphemistically referred to as 'imagination inflation.'

Conclusion

The more we know about how human beings process and recall
information, the better we become at communicating our marketing
messages to website audiences that are decidedly more complex,
and emotionally motivated, than can be determined by mere
demographic profiling or statistical Web-visitor analytics.
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Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design
firm specializing in Web-audio and Web-video websites and
presentations. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads,
http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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