The Brain Says Disney Super Bowl Ads the Best

(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) – The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has spoken: The top Super Bowl ad this year was the Disney World spot featuring several Steelers and Seahawks players practicing the famous line: "I'm going to Disney World." This may come as a surprise to people who follow the annual pilgrimage to the heights of the advertising stratosphere, where a 30-second spot cost an average of $2.4 million this year. USA Today's poll showed that the Bud Light "secret fridge" ad was the audience favorite, while a survey by The Wall Street Journal named the FedEx caveman ad. But neither of those polls had the ventromedial prefrontal cortex going for them, let alone the orbitofrontal cortex or the amygdala. These multisyllabic terms all refer to parts of the brain, and that's what differentiated the Super Bowl ad measurements done by FKF Applied Research and UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. To mimic the Super Bowl viewing audience, researchers took three men and two women between the ages of 23 and 37 and conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains while they watched the Super Bowl ads. They focused on three areas of the brain associated with desire, reward and positive connections to others, and three areas that signal conflict, fear and trying to repress negative reactions, said Dr. Joshua Freedman, a UCLA psychiatrist. Based on those scans, the Disney World ad was the hands down winner in the intensity of positive brain signals. A close and somewhat surprising second went to the Sierra Mist ad, in which an airport security crew swipes a Sierra Mist from a passenger by pretending it is setting off their detector. Surprising flops in the brain scans: The sensitive Dove ad, featuring a heartwarming message of support for young girls; and the sentimental Budweiser Clydesdale ad, showing how a colt was able to pull a heavy beer wagon out of the barn.