British business author and college lecturer Robert Heath is the special guest of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI) at a members’ breakfast seminar in Dublin in September. Heath’s presentation will focus on the way in which emotion in advertising is processed and how this enables advertising to influence consumers when they pay little attention to it. He will show that it’s the emotional content in advertising, not the message, which tends to build strong brand relationships.
His research controversially suggests that emotive creativity in TV advertising tends if anything to reduce, not increase, attention, but this can make advertising more effective by inhibiting counter-argument. For this reason he argues that traditional measures such as ad awareness and recall are seriously flawed and describes other more effective ways of measuring advertising effectiveness.
Heath is a senior lecturer at Bath University School of Management. He started his career with Unilever and then spent 20 years as an agency planner, working on Marlboro, Heineken and Stella Artois. In 1998 he took an interest in advertising processing at low attention levels and in 2001 published his monograph The Hidden Power of Advertising. His latest book, Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising, was published in April and has been widely acclaimed as a ‘must read’ for anyone in adland.
The book is reviewed by John Fanning in the May 2012 issue of Marketing.ie. Heath has been awarded prizes by the IPA, International Journal of Advertising and the UK Market Research Society. He is a fellow of the UK Market Research Society, fellow and board member of the European Advertising Academy and a member of the advisory board for the Wharton Future of Advertising project.
John Fanning, lecturer on branding and marketing communications in the Smurfit Business School and Marketing.ie columnist, will host the Q&A session with Heath in Studio 5 in The Factory on Barrow Street. The event runs from 8.30-10am on Thursday, September 27 and bookings can be made by contacting IAPI.
For more details, click on http://www.iapi.com/index.php?s=press_centre
