Research

At the time of writing Daybreak is less than 3 weeks old, but already the ratings have settled and a solid launch has been achieved. Currently, Daybreak’s audience is broadly in line with GMTV’s audience, as we had anticipated.  Now begins the task of steadily growing the ratings.  Breakfast viewing habits are notoriously difficult to change and this process will take time, but we are convinced that our new offering will win over the breakfast audience.

Down the years we have conducted a great deal of research investigating the wants and needs of the breakfast audience. This has all been channelled in to the making of our new show.

We have also invested heavily in research that demonstrates the unique benefits of advertising at breakfast-time.  Our research programmes have proved that consumers are more likely to remember ads if they have seen them at breakfast-time, and perhaps more importantly, they are more likely to act upon those messages. In recent years we have turned to cutting edge neuroscience techniques in order to explain this phenomenon and have discovered that the brain is fundamentally more receptive to advertising messages at breakfast-time. In short, this research proves that consumers are more likely to remember, like and understand commercials if they see them early in the day.

To find out more about our research, please download the document on the right hand side.

Our first neuroscience project, Breakfast Brainwaves, set out to explain why breakfast-time is such an effective time of day for marketing communications.  We decided to use FMRI brain scanning technology which allowed us to see inside our respondents’ brains while they were exposed to television advertising.  The brain scans clearly demonstrated that areas of the brain know to be associated with positive emotion, memory encoding and comprehension are more responsive to ads at breakfast-time.  In other words, ads are more likely to remembered, liked and understood if seen early in the day.  A review of academic literate revealed that there is a clear biochemical explanation for these results; key hormones and neurotransmitters are at their highest levels in the brain at breakfast-time and these drive the brain’s enhanced receptivity at this time.

Our latest neuroscience project, Switch-on to Breakfast,  examines the subject of brand switching in FMCG markets. We wanted to examine the extent to which habitual brand purchasing could be overcome in low involvement FMCG categories. We conducted a large scale, online simulated shopping exercise and a corresponding FMRI study to demonstrate the existence of specific neural networks that control habitual purchasing and brand switching behaviours.  The results also demonstrate that brand switching is significantly easier to facilitate with messages received early in the day.

For more information please contact Steve.Elliott@itv.com or Ashley.Newman@itv.com