How to become immune to advertising

Here is a thought that might unsettle you a little. Right now, you are not only someone who sends messages. You are also a target for them. Every advertisement, every logo, every carefully packaged pitch is trying to get inside your head and nudge your thinking a little. Presentation skills, after all, are largely about wrapping a message so it is easy to remember, easy to understand, and likely to persuade. I have written plenty about how easily we humans are influenced, and handed out no end of tips for doing the influencing. So it is only fair that I now hand you something for the other side of the table.

Because there is, it turns out, a "cure". You do not have to be a slave to the advertising you never asked to absorb. Researchers at the University of Cologne made a rather wonderful discovery: if you eat popcorn while the adverts play at the cinema, you will not take them in, and you will not remember them.

What the researchers did

They invited 96 people to the cinema. Half were given popcorn to munch on, half were not. A week after their trip to the pictures, the participants sat a test in which they looked at images. Half the images were from the adverts they had seen, and half were other, randomly chosen advertising images. They were asked to point out the ones they recognised, and the researchers also measured their positive psychological reactions to the pictures. To keep old memories out of it, the clips and images were taken from countries other than Germany, where the study was run.

In a second test, 188 participants were given the same cinema experience, with adverts that included, among other things, skin lotions. A week later they were handed real money to go and buy skin lotion in a shop. The result? The popcorn chewers were not swayed by the advertising in the slightest. They chose more or less at random. The ones who had not been chewing, however, reached in large numbers for exactly the lotions they had seen advertised.

Why on earth would popcorn matter?

The theory is that it is our "inner voice" that creates the impression. Notice it for yourself next time you see an advert or a logo: you quietly say the word to yourself, inside your head. It is that little repetition that lays down the impression and the memory. And you will find you do not do it nearly so much when your mouth is busy chewing on something, popcorn included.

If this finding gains traction, cinemas are going to have an awkward time persuading advertisers to keep buying space. And what can you take from it?

• Do not chew on anything while you are trying to rehearse information into your brain.
• If you are trying to influence someone, make sure they are not chewing.
• And if you want to stay immune to influence yourself, chew away.

If you would like to dig into the detail, the study was covered by The Guardian and published by the University of Cologne.