THE PINK GORILLA

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November 11th, 2008

Got a few minutes? If so, here’s a video I’d like you to take a look at. It is an 18-second video of two three-person teams, each passing a basketball to team members. What I’d like you to do is count the number of times the WHITE TEAM passes the ball. Click here to view the video. (Visual Cognition Lab) Once you’ve viewed it, check back here to see if you were correct.

So how many times was the White Ball passed? Was it 12? 13? 14?

If you said 14, congratulations. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Now, what about the gorilla? What gorilla, you ask? Play the video again, and this time instead of focusing on the basketballs, look for the gorilla.

Don’t be surprised if you missed the gorilla the first time. This video was part of an experiment done by University of Illinois cognitive psychologist Daniel J. Simons to demonstrate how our conscious minds work. Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that every moment of every day sorts through the overwhelming amount of stimuli we’re hit with and instantaneously determines where our conscious attention needs to be focused. If our subconscious filter determines something to be of no relevance to the task at hand, then even though we may see it, we won’t really see it.

That’s how we missed the gorilla.

Now imagine the same scenario playing out in living rooms all across America. Only instead of counting basketball passes, folks are involved in American Idol or NFL football or Iron Chef. And when the commercial break comes (the gorilla), they often won’t even see it because they’re not looking for it.

This selective perception is a challenge we face everyday in what Seth Godin refers to as “interruption marketing.” We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. We have to use every tool of subterfuge at our disposal to hammer our way into our customers’ consciousness. And the most effective tools we have are those that draw on the emotions.

Conscious thought rarely has the reins of emotion. So if we can successfully tug at a heart string/make someone laugh/help someone feel better about him/herself, we’ve gotten past the conscious gatekeeper and found a way into our customers’ psyches.

So in these days when every dollar counts and we need our advertising to “work harder,” and the tendency is to forego entertaining or “soft” commercials in favor of nuts-and-bolts hard sell, remember the gorilla.

After all, if he’d been pink, you probably would have picked him out right away.