Commercial Ads and the Brain

Fishing is my earliest memory that I have with my dad. I can recall my first catch, which was a brim, and I remember exactly how the day went. I woke up to the smell of the breakfast my dad prepared and we headed out to the lake. My line was snagged several times in the tree, but I will never forget that little brim I caught. My dad cooked the fish and made a sandwich for me. The sandwich was amazing. Years later, I was watching the Roland Martin rocket fishing rod commercial and I was ecstatic. What kid wouldn’t want a fishing rod that shoots bait out like a nerf gun? I begged my parents to buy the fishing rod for 2 years. Unfortunately, my dad never bought it because he said the spin-cast and baitcaster reels were enough. The pitch of the commercial emphasized avoiding tree snags and used phrases like totally cool and high-tech engineering. They also try to get the consumer to assume they’ll catch many fish on the rod with minimal effort. These keywords and images from the commercial were likely stored in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus of my brain. Since the hippocampus is involved in the processing and storing long-term memories associated with emotion. The joy felt from watching the commercial never left my brain. The thought of snagging my spin cast line in a tree provokes negative feelings. So, the parahippocampal gyrus likely compared my experience of snagging my line in the trees to the promise of not getting caught in the trees. My current fishing buddies will tell you that I still contemplate buying a rocket fishing rod from Amazon, but deep down I know the product idea is terrible.