Proving the link between creativity and effectiveness is the holy grail of advertising research. Thinkbox's event "The Winning Formula: TV creativity and effectiveness" was devoted to understanding what drives effective TV creativity, and how we can improve our ads' chances of success.

In this filmed session from the event, Rory Sutherland, President of the IPA, talks about behavioural economics and how its theories work alongside the principles of neuroscience. Rory's enthusiasm for behavioural economics and neuroscience lies in the fact that they are models for human behaviour, decision making and human value-judgement that are actually based on our true selves.

Behavioural Economics is a reputable scientific discipline that seeks to link human behaviour (heuristics, biases, tendencies) to economic behaviour, and as a result, Rory argues, it's pretty much central to what we do.

"What's so vital about behavioural economics and about neuroscience is they actually give the numerical justification to our inner thoughts that previously previously were effectively suppressed or ignored."

Rory Sutherland, President of the IPA

In this film

• " Why it's completely wrong to think of behavioural interventions supplanting the need for advertising
• " Emotional framing and choice architecture
• " Professor Thaler and the concept of nudging
• " Priming: creating a comparative framework in which a decision is made
• " Path dependency of decision making, from category levels to brand levels
• " The degree to which human decision making is disproportionately influenced by the framework, the architecture, the interface or the medium in which the decision is made. Sometimes the frame within which we make a decision may have a bigger effect on our decision than the long term consequences of the decision.
• " Thaler's "save more tomorrow" pension and how this could be applied to advertising.
• " The Sussex road safety campaign and how this is a brilliant case of using behavioural economics to understand that social and family norms are probably the strongest motivation on behaviour: a much more powerful message than one that appeals to individual self-interest.
• " How our inner lizard brains are badly treated in a world where all institutions must justify rationally and to other rational minds, every decision and course of investment that's made, and where our rational brains also get to define the problem.
• " The rational brain and the unconscious brain. How we are incapable of putting thoughts to our inner feelings, or if we can, we may choose to censor ourselves.
• " The behaviour of numerate red traffic lights in Korea and why Rory is vehemently apposed to high-speed rail.

Further links

You may have already noticed that this is a deep and complex subject, full of sentences that you have to read twice, which is why it is particularly handy that the IPA have published a couple of pieces on the subject: We're All Choice Architects Now: Second edition and Behavioural Economics - Red Hot or Red Herring? You can access them here.