The use of neurophysiological measures in studying social advertising effectiveness

The advertising is very essential component of a well-prepared social campaign. Thanks to the occurrence of the campaign in the media, it can reach the larger number of potential customers and initiate a number of positive changes. Effectiveness of the advertising, no matter if it is commercial or social, depends heavily on the message that is communicated. An effective message should engage the recipient’s mind and shape his consciousness, as it can significantly increase the impact of social campaign. Therefore, before deciding on the final form of advertising, it is a good practice to generate some alternative messages and pretest them to find the best one. Pretesting involves using various methods to exam messages and materials with the target audience members. The traditionally used methods in this scope are based on self-report questionnaires. But due to some disadvantages of this type of methods, cognitive neuroscience tools are more and more popular in scientific advertising research. However, such tools have also their limitations so some scholars advocate using cognitive neuroscience in combination with traditional survey methods to augment data collected, for a more informed interpretation. In this context, the question arises, what is the correlation between traditional measures of social advertising effectiveness and neurophysiological measures, and how research should be conducted to make the best use of the potential of both groups of methods. Therefore, the aim of the presented article is to show what traditional metrics are used in assessing the effectiveness of social campaigns advertising and which neurophysiological measures could complement them. Additionally, a framework for assessing the effectiveness of media messages in social campaigns using triangulation of cognitive neuroscience and diagnostic survey methods is proposed.