Emotion plays a hugely important role in our brains. In many ways our emotions perform now just as they did thousands of years ago, when remembering events that had a strong emotional impact, was linked to our survival.
Nowadays when we experience emotion, part of our brain is still programmed to remember this response because it indicates something big and important is going on. Advertising that elicits a strong emotional response - whether positive or negative is more likely to be remembered than ads that don't.
Narrative allows us to easily process a piece of communication by creating a structure that our brains can relate to and follow. (Our brains store away the information needed to make sense of what is going on). In advertising, this means that branding which is closely linked to an ad's narrative is more likely to be encoded into memory.
The third key driver of memory is personal relevance - put simply, we remember information which is relevant to our particular lives.
Magazines attract us because they tap into three drivers. More closely targeted than many other media, the skill of an editor is to boost this targeted effect by designing content which will tap into the target readers' emotions because it is personally relevant to them.
The effect is further enhanced by the power of context - which plays to the brain's need for narrative and structure.
If a piece of advertising is a good fit with the context in which it is being seen, its impact is all the greater. So a fashion ad in a fashion magazine is likely to attract more attention than the same fashion ad in, say, a national newspaper, even when it's seen by the same person.
Consumers' openness to magazine content is something quite unique in the media world. Our brains are wired to reject messages that are felt to be too intrusive.
Part of the brain called the Orbital Frontal Cortex protects us from being over-susceptible to what we see and hear, and this tends to put up a metaphorical 'shutter' in response to a hard sell.
This can effectively block over-intrusive advertising, however, it is likely to benefit magazines which are (generally) not perceived as a 'shouty' medium.
Our consumer neuro-research findings show that, particularly for advertisers who incorporate the three key drivers of memory encoding - emotion, narrative and memory encoding into their ad - and keep it subtle, magazines will continue to provide a positive context for brands to be communicated to and remembered by consumers.