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This year’s Sports Media Marketing Summit & Awards in New York will feature seven-minute master classes from sports industry leaders and media innovators.
In anticipation of the Summit, Brief spoke with John Ford from SyncSense, who will deliver one of the master classes on using neuroscience to optimize your marketing and video assets. His session is on Nov. 19 at 11:15 a.m. at The Paley Center for Media.
The casual television viewer has probably barely noticed, but a growing number of broadcast and cable networks are trying to harness the latest developments in neuroscience to build a better promo.
John Ford is a veteran cable executive who has been running cable networks for more than 20 years, including TLC, Discovery and National Geographic. He’s currently a partner at SyncSense, a media consulting firm that helps marketers use basic principles of neuroscience to improve viewer tune-in, retention and ROI.
“Sync Sense is an ethos for using the way everyone’s brain works to optimum advantage in short-form video, whether it’s a promotional spot or a commercial a tease leading into a show. What we do is use what we know about the way everyone’s brain works and apply that to shooting and editing short-form video so that it has the optimal impact on getting viewers to do what they want them to do,” Ford told Brief.
It starts with a simple concept: human brains like syntonization. That means that if someone is saying the word “two” on the air, we want to see the number two, or a person holding up two fingers.
The problem is that a lot of promos these days just don’t adhere to that principle. There’s a lot of info to pack into a 30-second spot, and marketing is a creative process, after all. So science is usually the last thing on a team’s mind when they’re assembling a spot. Still, since our brains are wired to register things that are synchronized more than things that aren’t, a viewer is more likely to receive the promo message if some simple synchronization is incorporated.
Take NBC Nightly News as an example. Ford and his colleagues went in and helped the Nightly News team adjust their opening news tease to better engage the audience.
This was the opener pre-SyncSense:
The problem: Brian William’s news script doesn’t match the titles in the box on the screen. The graphics department and the news writers aren’t synced up. So viewers probably aren’t registering what he’s saying.
And here’s the video post-SyncSense:
One of the most common mistakes Ford and his team see marketers make is putting a date and time slug in the lower third of the screen. Humans aren’t naturally very good at processing both the visual message you’re presenting in the promo and the tune-in message you’re displaying in the lower third. The result might be that they don’t figure out when to tune in at all.
“We tend to over-estimate how good at multi-tasking our brains are,” he said.
Ford’s team has already worked with ABC News, NBC News, WE, AMC Networks, National Geographic, HBO, TNT and Travel Channel.
“As someone who has run channels and has had to meet bottom-line goals, I’m really excited about something that promises to deliver ratings,” Ford said.
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