Many of you would have seen the Reebok NFL Fantasy League viral video where a handful of NFL players perform super human feats of skill (see below) which has been hugely successful which I gauge through the fact that I have been sent it via about 4 different peer to peer channels which to me suggests its saturated my peer group at least. The use of cgi to create an effect where the skills in the video look super human but almost not (they are world class athletes after all) is a sneaky trick that results in very high levels of engagement and can be explained with basic 2nd year psych theory.
According to psychologists in the area of human information processing when we view an object or scene we do not process all of the information in front of us but rely on a bank of previous information which we attribute to something based on expectation. For example when you see a car your brain has hardwired into its neural network information about cars you have seen and experienced in the past. It then looks for the bits that are missing or new and processes those elements rather than processing the whole concept again, much in the same a proxy will cache information. This explains how anything new is more likely to be interesting to us because we are busily engaged trying to fill in the information gaps and form the concept. In the case of something like the NFL Fantasy League viral there is a more of a dissonance because unreal elements have been introduced into the mix which therefore means there is more of an information gap which requires filling and hence greater engagement in order to close that gap and form the concept in our brain.
This partly explains why a campaign like this is so engaging and so popular, not only is it cool and very well executed but this slight dissonance where you’re forced to some degree to ask the question, hang on is that for real? prompts a deeper level of engagement. In effect it opens up information processing channels and the message cuts through far more efficiently. There are surely other ways this kind of cognitive gap have been exploited even offline but with the success of this viral and a very similar one by EA Sports to promote Fifa Street we might just see a few more like it in the near future.
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October 14, 2009 at 6:23 am
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