Neural resonance in consumers' right inferior frontal gyrus predicts attitudes toward advertising

Advertising plays a critical role in the commercial success of services and products. However, despite a long history of attempts to evaluate the efficacy of advertisements, actual objective, consistent means of assessing and anticipating whether an advertisement might be effective and why it would be expected to translate to actual, desired purchasing decisions remain elusive—especially as this regards advertisements' ability to resonate or create emotional connections across audiences. In this study, focusing on female participants, we employed functional near‐infrared spectroscopy to monitor brain activations over empathy and emotional contagion regions as individuals viewed advertisements, matched with a multi‐brain network model for assessing synchronicity patterns across all participants' brains. Study 1 demonstrated that high‐scoring advertisements induced more densely coupled brain activations among participants in their right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), tied to emotional empathy via embodied experience, and thus potentially representing shared understandings and emotional resonance among consumers. Study 2 replicated this finding with popular music and confirmed that density of the right IFG multi‐brain network could predict real‐world population‐level performance, thus presenting an intriguing new tool that might be coupled with other assessments.