In February of 2007, as the New England Patriots squared off against the New York Football Giants, advertisers were paying $2.6 million dollars for a piece of the action. This high price tag was justified by the purported 90 million viewers who tuned in for the big game-but what's funny about all this is that there's a good chance that those advertisers were just wasting their money.
For the past decade or so, University of Michigan psychologist Brad Bushman has been studying the effects of violence on memory. He's published a number of different important papers on the topic in that period, most of which looked at the effects that watching violent TV content had on viewers ability to recall the commercials they also saw along the way.
Across the boards, when it came to recalling commercials, the viewers tended to draw blanks.
This happens because of two interrelated problems. The first is that we have a limited amount of storage space in the brain so the brain prioritizes what gets filed as memory and what gets discarded as trash. The second is the brain, for obvious evolutionary reasons, pays more attention to violent cues than it does to other things.
Since violence is often a matter of life or death and since other things aren't, the brain prioritizes storing the violent images over the not-so-violent-and football, as these things go, is a very violent game.
Making matters worse, Bushman has also discovered that anger tends to impair memory and since football fans tend to be extremely passionate about their sport, those fans whose team is losing--meaning those fans who tend to get angrier about dropped passes or blown calls or missed field goals--are compounding the problem.
Why? Because if you couple angry feelings to violent images you're telling the brain that these violent images are even more important than previously suspected so the brain is going to store even more of those and less of the fluff in between.
So for advertisers who want to reach local markets like Detroit or Cleveland-two cities whose home teams haven't won much as of late-may be wasting their money outright.
What makes all of this especially ironic is that advertisers tend to buy air time in blocks. So they may shell out big dollars for time during the big game, but their ads also get repeated during sport's related content shown afterwards-like during ESPN football programs and Sports Center and such.
But here's the catch: Bushman has also discovered that ruminating over violence and anger and the like further impairs memory-basically by reactivating the same system. So not only are football fans missing the content of those commercials the first time around, they're also likely to not recall them during repeated airings.
