Although this commercial was never actually used by Bridgestone as they did not feel it represented them appropriately, it racked up millions views on YouTube and ended up being their most viewed commercial. Worked out well for Bridgestone as they got free worldwide advertising!There are three ways we could explain why this commercial had so much success compared to perhaps more generic ads. Firstly of course; humour. There is a lot to be said about the effect humour has in advertising. Although humour may not always be universal because of language barriers for example, there are generally widely accepted topics that everyone can agree are amusing. This commercial plays with this idea as not one word is spoken but the video still shares an idea that everyone can understand. Sternthal and Craig (1973) explain how humorous messages attract attention, which distracts the audience and which in turn leads to a reduction in criticism and an increase in persuasion. Clearly this works in the commercials favour, as it would increase the likelihood for someone to buy Bridgestone tyres. Additionally, the fact that the ad is now in your mind means when you come to choose which new tyres you want for your car, the availability heuristic will ensure they are Bridgestone tyres.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Elm-diagram.jpg/406px-Elm-diagram.jpg Another way to look at the persuasive power of this ad is through the heuristic-systematic model of information processing (Chaiken, 1980), which explains how people receive and process persuasive messages. HSM allows both systematic and heuristic processing to occur; heuristic processing requires minimal cognitive effort on the part of the audience, basically like a mental short-cut whereas systematic processing requires more comprehensive and analytical thinking. Depending on the audience’s involvement in the message content, heuristic and systematic processing can occur independently or at the same time. Specifically, Lancendorfer, Atkin and Reece (2008) found that people processed ads with dogs more heuristically, and if people process more heuristically then ad liking increases. He explains that the presence of the dog in the ad suppresses the systematic processing and increases the heuristic processing, ultimately leading to an increased positive attitude towards the ad. Overall, the accepted belief is that animals in commercials instigate good feelings and subsequently a positive view of the brand. This process is similar to the elaboration-likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), where there are also two routes to process information, depending on how much cognitive effort the audience is willing to use. They will take the central route if a lot of cognitive effort is used, just like systematic processing.  Whereas the peripheral route will be taken when there is less cognitive effort such as in heuristic processing. This shows how the audience would be more persuaded by a commercial containing a dog as it requires less cognitive effort to process and is thus more pleasant for the viewer. I previously mentioned the use of humour in this commercial, but what really makes it that funny? An important aspect to look at is the use of anthropomorphism, which is the practice of giving human characteristics to non-human things such as animals or inanimate objects. A successful ad elicits a physiological response in the viewer, which makes them connect with the content subsequently making the message harder to forget. The commercial becomes relatable through the use of anthropomorphism, as even though they are animals the emotions they feel are human. Additionally, it was found that people actually prefer animals in advertising when they are presented anthropomorphically (Connel, 2013). As explained above, the use of animals already increases the commercial appeal and by anthropomorphising the dog it makes it even more persuasive.So basically if you want a successful commercial, include a dog acting like a human.References Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 39(5), 752.Connell, P. (2013). The role of baseline physical similarity to humans in consumer responses to anthropomorphic animal images. Cass Knowledge.Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.Lancendorfer, K. M., Atkin, J. L., & Reece, B. B. (2008). Animals in advertising: Love dogs? Love the ad!. Journal of Business Research, 61(5), 384-391.Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In Communication and persuasion (pp. 1-24). Springer New York.Sternthal, B., & Craig, C. S. (1973). Humor in advertising. The Journal of Marketing, 12-18.

Have you ever thought about an amount of bad news you hear every day? Or maybe, could you remind yourself the last good news you hear about?https://www.flickr.com/photos/caribb/15418956100Latterly, every time I turn on TV, radio or open any newspaper I have low odds to come across such topics as crisis, shootings, or corruption. And unfortunately, every time it convinces me how terrifying this world is. A level of cortisol in my blood increases because it seems that evil is closer and closer. And finally, I’m wondering if any bigger good happens that is worthy to show during evening news. Of course, except for celebrities’ weddings, divorces, private life confessions or shocking faux pas in dress code. These issues find their place between one tragedy and another – I am supposed to be cool about it. However, still – isn’t true that bad news rush everyday headlines?In my opinion it is truth. And luckily for me there are scientists of the same point of view. Trussler and Soroka (2014) did a study wherein asked people to choose some articles from a news website to read in order to measure their eye-tracking. Of course, they hid a real purpose of their study. What shouldn’t be surprising in the context of this paper, most participants chose negative stories. Even though at the same time they declared that they preferred good news and discommended media that provided overfull negative facts. In another study that was focused on electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex, it was also proved that people react stronger to negative stimuli, e.g. a mutilated face than positive or neutral one (Ito, Larsen, Smith,& Cacioppo, 1998). Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs (2011) made a wide review of studies to answer the question whether bad is stronger than good. Trying to answer the above, they were searching for proofs in many fields including reacting to events, relationships, emotions, learning, memory, information processing , health etc. Evidences indicate that we respond strongly to bad things. In particular it applies to those bad news that retain in our unawareness even after an extinction of behavior changes that were caused by a negative stimuli.Michael J. Robinson (People & the Press American, 2007) went a step further and focused only on topics of news and prepared synthesis of 165 American surveys. He found that topics such a war, terrorism, disasters were in top 5 categories that had attracted people between 1986-2006. Robinson,M. J. (2007). The news interest index 1986–2007: Two decades of American news preferences/Part 1: Analyzing what news the public follows- and doesn’t follow.Indeed, there is no doubt that our news are overfull by pervasive mares. Why is that happening? Most studies mention a term “negativity bias”. To understand it, we need to start from the very beginning. Thus, in the beginning there was a fear that kept us alive. Being better responsive to dangerous situation, such as for example a meeting with wild animals, our odds to survive and pass genes increased significantly (Baumesiter et all., 2001). Unfortunately, times of our ancestors weren’t romantic and a rustle of leaves couldn’t be treated as a singing of nature and a doubtful entertainment was running away from a tiger.Daniel Kahneman (2011) a man who whole life studies psychology perspective of decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, also brings the theory of fast reacting for bad signs of predator in his book Thinking fast and slow (2001). Moreover, he writes about human “mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news” and pay our attention that bad words such a crime or war (which we can hear in media everyday) attract our attention faster that happy ones. When we’ve already known our original “tendency to bad”, following Rozin and Royzman (2001) we can understand that negativity bias is “a principle that comes out in most situations, whereas negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events.” Actually, I’ve also found another, a little different but still an interesting explanation. I would like to mention John Allen Paulos (1990), a famous American mathematician, who was tempted to write in his book Innumeracy that our focusing on bad news is a part of probability theory and was mostly related to people leaving in big cities, but it isn’t now. Why? According to statistics, unusual accidents aren’t very often. However, in population of millions of people, a probability that something bad will happen is higher. Even 1% becomes important and significant in ratio of an average city. Thus, the bigger population you live in, you are more aware of the occurred accidents. Nevertheless, times are changing and now when most people have access to news from all over the world, the prevalence of bad news increases for everyone. The truth is that no matter which theory we are more susceptible with regard to daily bad breaking news, we definitely spend more time focusing on them what is very profitable for media concerns. Of course, the solution is not to stop watching TV, listening to radio or using computer – however this idea probably would be quite useful for many of us not only in this case. Anyway, every day we should try to concentrate on a good that surrounds us. I believe that thanks to that, we will see the difference in our attitude to the life. And if someone asks you to remind yourself last news, please remember, it should be something good that made you smile.References:Trussler, M.,& Soroka, S. (2014). Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 19(3), 360–79.Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, N. K., & Cacioppo,J. T. (1998). Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887-900.Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C.,&Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323-370.Robinson,M. J. (2007). The news interest index 1986–2007: Two decades of American news preferences/Part 1: Analyzing what news the public follows- and doesn’t follow. Retrieved November 12, 2016, from http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/old-assets/pdf/NewsInterest1986-2007.pdfKahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow (pp. 300-302). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 296-320.Paulos, J. A. (1990). Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Just Ask!Im sure many of you are aware of the nightmare traffic getting into Glastonbury festival each year. Even those who don’t attend the festival are bombarded with traffic updates on the radio and news reports describing the sheer backlog of traffic. Well I was one of those Glastonbury goers this year, caught up somewhere in the thousands of people waiting in the 9 hour queues to get in.However, this is a tale of how I avoided most of the traffic in and out of the festival.How?By asking. The morning that we were meant to leave for the festival, we were warned by practically every form of social media and news report not to leave, and possibly delaying going until Thursday.  Glastonbury live traffic updates told any festival goer that if they hadn’t left yet, not to as they would be expected to be stuck for up to 9 hours.  Ignoring all warnings, we set off, and sooner or later 45 minutes into our journey, we hit the queue. We also had one tiny problem. we hadn’t previously purchased a car parking space online, and we soon realised that there were limited ones on the gate, therefore, we needed to get there ASAP, there was no way we could be turned away, not after all that excitement and queueing! Tweets by festival goers describing the traffic problems!Frustration rising in people waitingAfter tediously crawling through the trail of traffic (4 hours later, still going strong) we made it to a roundabout which was grid locked. We walked up and down the road, stopping for the toilet, grabbing snacks, and still would return to the same space we had been in 30 minutes ago. Since we had nowhere to go, other than wait to join the string of traffic we turned to the policeman guiding the traffic and simply smiled sweetly, and asked ‘Excuse me sir, but is there ANY other way into another Glastonbury car park or a way we can get a spare ticket before they run out?’…We all expected him to say, ‘sorry girls, just follow the traffic just like everyone else’. But no. To our astonishment he responded with, ‘Well girls, Im not meant to tell you this, and could get in a lot of trouble, but if you go across this round about, where absolutely no cars are going and follow the road around to the left (some other vague instructions) then there is an empty car park no one has opened yet. If you go that way you will find it and will be let in. You didn’t hear that from me!’We couldn’t believe what we had just heard him. What happens if he was wrong or worse we were sent back and had lost our space in the queue? Too late, we had raced off, we had to take the gamble.A short while later, we found the empty car park and drove straight in and bought a car parking ticket. We were unbelievably chuffed. Admittedly it then did take us around 4 more hours to wade through the thick mud to find a place to pitch our tent, but that’s not the point. As if to think our luck had ended. Oh no oh no… So the festival organisers recommended leaving the festival between 3am-6am (only 6 hours wait) opposed to leaving after 7am the next day which they estimated would take 9 hours in a car to get out of the traffic. We decided to leave around 3 am, and considering we would be stuck for 6 hours, we prepared ourselves for this, fetched snacks (sobered up in plenty of time) and finally found the car in our miracle space (in the pitch black). Whilst walking past the rows and rows of parked cars queuing to get out, we overheard one man say he’d been queuing for 5 hours already and had moved only a few metres! This was going to be a very long night!Nevertheless, after being helped out by the traffic coordinates, to get the little car out of the mud pile, we simply tried our luck again and asked, ‘is there another way to get out  that you know of, even if you shouldn’t tell us?’ again fluttering our little lashes and smiling sweetly.To our luck he replied, ‘girls, I shouldn’t tell you this, but at the other side of this carpark there is a gate that leads to the main road, it’ll be shut but you can open it and go through, it’ll lead you straight out and avoid all this traffic.’We got back to Bristol in 45 minutes. I woke up at 1pm the next day to hear people were still stuck in traffic…This demonstrates the power of asking. Ask and you will get.The power of asking had been demonstrated within studies in psychology. Clark and Hatfield’s 1989 study tested this phenomena, by having male and female subjects asking the opposite sex questions such as ‘would you go on a date with me?’, ‘would you come round to my apartment?’, and finally ‘would you go to bed with me?’.  The results really do demonstrate the success in asking. A table of results from the original study, illustrating the success In this study, and a replication of the original study, when female subjects asked men these questions, the statistics are high. Most men agreed to going to bed and going to their apartment. Results are consistent across studies. There was a small gender difference in that when men asked women the same questions, they are likely not to respond in the same way. A replication of the original study, with similar resultsIt is fair to assume, most people in that queue were following the majority. This is an example of informative social influence/social proof, everyone in their cars were looking to others for what to do, and consequently one long trail of cars preceded. However, we resisted the conformity and took the plunge by asking for a quicker route, that would guarantee us a parking space. We had nothing to loose just by asking. The general consensus amongst a lot of people, is that they are too afraid to ask, because of damage to their self-image, or not wanting to impose. Studies indicate the overestimation of the embarrassing nature of asking. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. The benefits outweigh the costs!ReferencesCialdini, R. B. (1987). Influence (Vol. 3). A. Michel.Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 2(1), 39-55.Glastonbury festival-goers caught up in traffic chaos. (2016, July 22). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-36594006 Hald, G. M., & Høgh-Olesen, H. (2010). Receptivity to sexual invitations from strangers of the opposite gender. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(6), 453-458.Wittwer, J., Nückles, M., & Renkl, A. (2008). Is underestimation less detrimental than overestimation? The impact of experts’ beliefs about a layperson’s knowledge on learning and question asking. Instructional Science, 36(1), 27-52.