The youngsters in the office are on some kind of alt-80s trip. The playlists are made up of The Cure, Stone Roses, New Order and the like. Whether this is a genuine Gen Z trend or just a prompt to get incredulous stories about the Bunnymen and Icelandic ley lines out of the old guy (me), I can’t tell. The other day, I lost my thread in a briefing when Primal Scream’s Loaded unexpectedly popped out of the speakers.
For a long time, I held a vivid memory of the Scream at a midweek proto-hipster hangout in Aberdeen called the Flesh Exchange: the crowd and the band in near-identical spotty shirts, leather jeans and engineer boots, but most of all, the huge guitar blasts from the dubby bit in Loaded nearly bursting the sound system.
Except that couldn’t have happened. The legendary Weatherall Balearic remix of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have that became Loaded didn’t appear until early 1990, and the gig in question was in 85 or 86.
I had constructed an entire experience around the idea of it being played. My brain had confabulated its own completely fictional nostalgic flashback fantasy. And I believed it.
This kind of false memory mash-up isn’t as rare as it might seem. In fact, all of our memories are reconstructions. We don’t remember the original event at all — what we remember is the last time we remembered it. Except this time, Loaded pumping on the stereo also reminded me that my ‘memory’ was a false one.
According to psychologist Dr Julia Shaw memory is incredibly malleable, much more like a Weatherall remix than any original recording. Her research shows that our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, imagination and misattribution. In one study, she even out-Derrened Derren Brown by convincing 70% of a bunch of college students that they had committed a crime which never even took place. In other words, memory isn’t a static file — it’s a narrative that we continually rewrite in our heads. The mere suggestion of an event can trigger a vivid recollection of something that might never have happened.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Memory didn’t evolve to provide an objective record, it evolved as a tool to aid survival. It’s built to prioritise the storage of information that might help us avoid danger, find resources, or navigate social alliances, not to act as a flawless data capture. Our ancestors didn’t need a perfect memory — they just needed a useful one.
If memory is as fallible as the real research suggests, then our industry’s reliance on consumer recall as a measure of advertising effectiveness rests on even shakier foundations than we already suspected.
But your focus group or survey respondents aren’t lying. They genuinely believe their own narratives, and they have to say something to feel like they have earned their prawn sandwiches. It’s just that belief is no guarantee of truth when it comes to memory.
Much of what we are subsequently presented with as ‘consumer insight’ is built on these wobbly reconstructions and is nothing of the sort. It used to be the job of the planner to pick through the confabulations to find the scraps of truth. But that seems to have been, ironically, forgotten.
Frustrated by the fallibility of memory-based metrics — and trying to replace and improve upon traditional media metrics that measure surface-level interactions, like impressions or clicks — sections of the industry have correctly gone forth in search of more effective measures. If surveys, self-reports and viewability scores were letting us down, surely loading on some AI is the answer?
There are a number of methods in play, but all lean heavily on tracking eye movements. The logic seems legit. If consumers’ eyes are on the ad (even just for a few seconds), they must be paying attention. And if they’re paying some form of attention — categorised as active, passive and non-attention — the ad must be having an impact on some kind of (abstract) scale.
Firms are also bundling in claims around ‘behavioural’ data, ‘predictive’ modelling, and media ‘quality’ signals. What these terms are adding still seems a bit vague to me, but in fairness, the outputs do go beyond standard viewability metrics. Kinda.
While attention metrics do give us better data on whether an ad is seen, they suffer from some of the same flaws as memory recall: they’re indirect and unreliable proxies for something else.
The inconvenient truth is that attention happens in the mind, not the eyeballs. This means that attention metrics are proxies for real effectiveness outcomes that depend on much deeper cognitive processes, and which only reveal themselves after the fact.
A recent Google/Ehrenberg-Bass study — first reported here in MediaCat, by the way — tries valiantly to push things a bit further. The authors assert that tracking changes in heart rate is a better indicator of proper attention, especially combined with a brainwave-measuring electroencephalogram (EEG) gizmo.
In short, the research claims that heart rates tended to slow down when the EEG indicated that participants were giving attention to an ad.
It’s true that when something captures our attention, our body often responds by quieting down as we focus. Although somewhat dubiously, the researchers noted that simply asking people if they paid attention was still a reliable way to tell if they did. So we are back to square one — the same old self-reporting problem, plus another bunch of proxies.
So, what does attention look like? And how is it integrated with emotion and memory?
The real evidence points at something both obvious and profound: what’s currently being measured is the shadow of attention without the substance. Not least because eyeballs are merely receptors pumping data into the mind.
Evolutionary psychology offers the missing upstream view. Natural selection didn’t produce a general-purpose mind — it produced a set of specialised adaptations or domain-specific mechanisms, a primal scheme designed to solve recurring ancestral problems.
One of these adaptations is the orienting response. When something novel or important happens, our ancient survival circuits kick in: heart rate slows, senses sharpen, attention narrows. If you were a prehistoric human and you heard a sudden rustle in the bushes, you would freeze — until you figured out if it was lunch or you were about to be lunch.
When that Google-backed EBI study found heart rate slowing as an indicator of attention, it was essentially rediscovering this ancient orienting reflex — a built-in threat detection system still operating beneath the modern cortex.
This also shows why trying to isolate attention as a clean variable is a fool’s errand. Memory, attention and emotion didn’t evolve as independent modules; they evolved as interdependent subsystems working in tandem to help us navigate an unpredictable world.
Your ancestors who were better at noticing danger (attention), reacting emotionally (emotion), and remembering what to avoid (memory) had better odds of survival and reproduction. That’s why you are here and these faculties are still deeply ingrained today. Three is, indeed, the magic number.
If we must get geographical about the brain (don’t get me started on the left/right nonsense), it’s true that the amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (memory) and prefrontal cortex (decision-making and control) are tightly networked. And because memory is reconstructed afresh each time it is recalled — as the pseudo-murderous students in Dr Shaw’s study illustrate — new fragments can sneakily insert themselves. You can ‘remember’ things that never happened, like my Screamadelica premonition episode.
Trying to study these components one at a time is like trying to understand a car by examining only the wheels.
Neuroimaging shows that when something emotional occurs, attention, emotion and memory co-activate in the brain. Think of your mind as a network of ancient survival shortcuts: automatic systems that direct attention based on evolutionary priorities.
Getting upstream means speaking the brain’s native language by designing communication to trigger fundamental motives, like hunger, safety, social belonging, status and mating — the things our ancestors cared about because survival depended on them.
Fundamental motives are the evolutionary why behind attention. Designing for them first is like pushing pre-installed buttons in the human operating system. Measuring attention afterwards just tells you whether a button got pushed, not whether you used the right button to begin with.
This integration gives us a powerful framework for understanding real-world human behaviour, where emotional relevance guides attention and enhances memory to help us navigate the social and physical landscape, just as it helped our ancestors survive.
This doesn’t mean we throw out measurement altogether. It means we measure the right things at the right time, and accept what can’t easily be captured. Let’s use new tools to understand attention, but let’s also recognise their limits.
So next time you’re sitting with a client digging through campaign reports, check yourself. Are we measuring memory or just reinforcing our own memory myths? Are we tracking attention, or just seeing where eyeballs are pointing?
Because the real answers lie deeper — in the evolved, modular, messy human mind — and there’s no single metric for that.
It means being okay with some ambiguity and complexity. It means blending data with empathy, stats with storytelling. And it means remembering (ironically) that consumers are people, not eyeballs in a vacuum, and certainly not hard drives playing back perfect memories.
Our continued obsession with recall and now surface-level attention metrics is built on faulty assumptions. We assumed that if we could just find the perfect metric, we’d unlock the secret to influence. But human behaviour isn’t tidy. It lives in habit, instinct, and fundamental drives — things not easily captured by a spreadsheet, or even AI.
But with a little understanding of human nature, they are predictable, nonetheless.
So, don’t fight it. Feel it.
Featured image: Primal Scream’s 1991 album Screamadelica / Creation Records