Deconstructing the BA Posters with Neuroscience

There have been lots of plaudits for Uncommon’s latest OOH campaign for British Airways (as well as the inevitable detractors). I’m a fan. For me, it’s an excellent example of how to to create compelling imagery using three principles from neuroscience and cognitive psychology …

1. Prediction Error
Your brain’s job is to get you through life with the minimum calorific cost possible. So all the time it’s making predictions about the next most likely thing you’ll encounter – and if the world conforms to your brain’s prediction then you stay in autopilot. As you wander through the urban landscape you don’t expect to see the world from 30,000 feet. Nor do you expect to see a billboard with no headline and – to begin with at least – no logo. The image doesn’t match your brain’s prediction, so, suddenly, you’re alert, intrigued, curious …

2. The ‘Aha’ Moment
Most advertising fails because it doesn’t leave any room for the audience. It shouts at you – and no one likes being shouted at. But the best work leaves a space, or a gap, for you to complete the message. And with this campaign you have to carry a small cognitive load; you have to knit together the available visual information to make sense of the whole. The same principle applies to jokes: you ‘get’ a gag when you join the dots in a comedian’s story. Neuroscientists call this a ‘subcortical dopaminergic reaction’. The rest of us call it an ‘aha moment’. It makes you feel good. And advertising that makes you feel good is both rare and effective.

3. The Generation Effect
Psychologists have observed that there’s a significant difference between being given a piece of information directly and arriving at it yourself. The latter makes the information much more impactful and memorable: it’s much more likely to stay with you. This phenomenon is known as ‘the generation effect’. It’s showing, not telling. Something great novelists and dramatists have understood for centuries. And clearly Uncommon and British Airways understand this too.

If you’d like to mobilize insights like these next time you use imagery in your own work, join me in December for my London workshop, The Power of Pictures.