The right kind of subtle advertising targeting the subconscious mind is where the money is, according to new research

FOR MUCH of its history, Formula One has been a pitch man for the tobacco industry, and despite a ban on cigarette sponsorship for most of the last decade, the very sight of a Ferrari is enough to make smokers crave a fag, according to one of the leading proponents of neuro marketing.

Cigarette companies such as Philip Morris and British American Tobacco ploughed over €250 million annually in to the sport since Imperial Tobacco's Gold Leaf brand first sponsored F1 in 1968. Brands such as John Player Special, Marlboro, West, Lucky Strike and Mild Seven are as familiar to petrolheads as those of McLaren, Renault and Ferrari.

Martin Lindstrom is a neuro-marketing consultant and author of Buyology, a book based on a three-year, multimillion-dollar research project that exposed 2,000 consumers to branding materials while scanning their brains. He believes his research shows that the investment in Formula One made by the tobacco industry is still reaping rewards, both in terms of their brand image, and most importantly, in encouraging people to smoke.

"I'm endlessly impressed by Marlboro's ability to take the core values of Formula One - sex, speed, innovation, coolness - and apply them to a cigarette brand." says Lindstrom, a vehement anti-smoker himself.

"That is an amazing achievement. Just by showing me a red Ferrari car, much more so than if you show them an advert for cigarette smoking. On a personal level I hate it, because the evidence is clear that tobacco sponsorship does make people smoke more, and not just about switching brands, but professionally there is much to recommend."

"Even though that sponsorship is no longer legal we carried out experiments just showing a Formula One car, and people immediately craved cigarettes. What Marlboro have done is create a huge number of what I call smashable components to their brand. They are sending indirect, subconscious signals that are talking to the brain without explicitly telling it we are being sold to."

Lindstrom believes his findings have fundamental implications for the sponsorhip industry. "Sponsorship works when we are not really aware of the signals that are being sent: the messages get through because our guard is down, not up. A Formula One car passing below me with no logo is an example of this, and as a smoker it creates a craving, Pavlovian effect."

"When there are no logos around, my rational mind tells me I shouldn't crave those things. Without the logo my intuition kicks in and I want to smoke. The evidence is mounting that the most powerful form of sponsorship today is where you do not have a logo but you make up for this with smashable components of the brand."

Neuro marketing remains controversial, but the audience for its findings is growing rapidly. New product launches from Microsoft and Pepsico's Frito Lay subsidiary, the world's largest crisp snack manufacturer, used elements of neuro marketing and its application to other spheres, including politics, is proof at least that the story told by Martin Lindstrom is a compelling one.

If nothing else, it generates debate about how and why we buy what we do. Lindstrom's views on Formula One are just part of a broader piece on smoking in which he suggests that health warnings on cigarette packets not only fail to alter smokers' behaviour, but actually trigger even stronger cravings.

Even pictures of diseased lungs can set us off in the direction of the newsagent, according to the research, by stimulating the subjects' nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain associated with cravings.

He's not a fan of most product placement advertising either, the trend by which companies pay to place their brands within films or TV shows. The traditional TV ad, or 30-second spot, is under pressure from Sky Plus and other digital recorders, which allow fast-forwarding through the commercial breaks. In turn advertisers are paying to place their products inside the content of television shows and movies. With this approach, even if viewers avoid watching any 30-second spots, they can still see the brands.

Product placement is a €2 billion industry led by the US market. But Lindstrom's research showed that almost all product placements are ineffective, causing no increase in brand recall. Those that do get noticed do so because they are embedded so deeply within the story of the film or show, that it is a natural part of the environment.

In the same way that tobacco made itself a part of the Formula One story, Aston Martin is synonymous with James Bond, and no amount of marketing money from rivals Ford and Jaguar can affect that. Likewise, Louis Vuitton, or Heineken, which paid similarly large sums to be in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, were effectively deleted from our brains, because they were peripheral to the storyline.

"The vast majority of sponsorship and product placement doesn't work," says Lindstrom, "because it is aimed at the conscious part of the brain, which neuroscience tells us accounts for no more than 15 per cent of our cognitive capacity."

These lessons are being learnt. The deal between Ford and the makers of 24 is one of the highest-profile and lucrative in recent years. As part of the deal, Sutherland drives an Ford Expedition, and other models are woven into the story. "Basically, we own the show," says Rob Donnell, of advertising agency JWT.

However, there is still much wasted money being spent on irrelevant properties. The old tools are becoming redundant, says Lindstrom, particularly they way in which they are measured, focusing on the blunt instrument of brand awareness.

"The communications industry spends its time measuring awareness and hoping that some value transfer takes place, something we have never been able to prove. Now we can, and I'm convinced that we will see the sponsorship model change dramatically as a result.

"Marketing people will realise that it is not about plastering your logo everywhere - it is about context, and it's about embedding the message within the narrative of the story being told, whether that is a football match or a James Bond movie. Our research in to this is extensive, and it tells us that when a brand appears in a story at the wrong moment, we don't just ignore it, we delete it from our mind, such is our irritation at being interrupted.

"We are bombarded with thousands of direct marketing messages a day, very few of which we are able to take in, let alone process in to changing buying behaviour. Having a logo on the perimeter board is not worth the money, there has to be a synergy, where the brand becomes synonymous with the sport, and better still, becomes a ritual.

Likewise, rights holders must prove that they are about more than just awareness, which is not as valuable a commodity as it was 20 years ago, when the sponsorship model was built that still applies today.

"There are so many poor marketing people out there who must now ask themselves, do we have an emotional strategy? Do we have a subconscious strategy? What kind of indirect signals do we want to send?"