Hello digital, please put in your papers!
Paper is passe. Digital is the new normal, feel millennials. They may be right. Today’s generation don’t read much. Be it the daily newspaper or a random book. Why paper when screens can do the job better, most feel.
That may be, but new researches across the world are throwing cold water on those screens. Those who think paper is dead, done and dusted should be surprised and stunned by latest neuroscience research.
Canadian neuromarketing firm TrueImpact compared the effects of paper marketing – direct mailers etc – with digital marketing – email and display ads. Researchers used eye-tracking and high-resolution EEG brain wave measurements and supplemented them with conventional questionnaires for good measure. Three metrics were evaluated: Cognitive load (ease of understanding), Motivation (persuasiveness), and Attention (how long subjects looked at the content).
And the findings are……let the drumbeats roll…
Paper mailers required 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital mailers. Which means, paper mailers are easier to understand and are more memorable. Post-exposure tests also validated what the cognitive load test revealed about paper mailers’ memory encoding capabilities. When asked to cite the brand of an ad they had just seen, recall was 70% higher among respondents who were exposed to paper mails than digital mailers.
Oops!
Another study was done at Temple University, Philadelphia. This study used fMRI brain scans to compare digital and paper. It’s the technique widely used by academic researchers and can produce 3D images of activity in specific brain structures.
The most significant finding was that paper advertising activated the ventral striatum area of the brain more than what digital advertising was able to do. A previous study of successful ad campaigns had found that the ventral striatum was an indicator of desire and valuation. Put simply, the part of the brain that drives customers to buy. And paper ads scored a lot more!
Double oops!
Not just mailers, but there’s also enough and more research suggesting that our brains process a book differently if we read it in paper format via-à-vis on an e-reader. A Norwegian study concluded that ‘students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally.’
Another study by San Jose University has found that ‘screen‐based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one‐time reading, non‐linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in‐depth reading, and concentrated reading. Decreasing sustained attention is also noted.’
Hello Kindle, are you listening!
If you can take a little more, a study conducted by Bangor University and branding agency Millward Brown used fMRI to study the different effects of paper and digital media. They found that physical material is more real to the brain. It is better connected to memory and involves more emotional processing, which is important for memory and brand associations. Physical materials produced more brain responses suggesting greater internalization of the ads!
There you are. Science is clearly showing paper can be more impactful and memorable than digital. The world may have become binary, but it’s paper content that stays in memory!
Let’s look at it another way. When you wish to look at the pic of your loved one, try holding his or her photo in your hand rather than staring at it on a screen. Which one is more emotional?
Touché! It’s ironic that you are reading this article here – in a digital medium. I wish I could print it and have it delivered to you!
