This Is Not Persuasion
How Advertising Works in 2025
This morning, I told my husband I was stuck on my weekly Substack post. He’s a long-time professional voice actor, and without missing a beat, he said: “How does advertising work, and the idea of persuasion?”
It was a good question. Simple, obvious, and just below the surface of everything we scroll past, click through, or brush off as harmless. In media psychology, persuasion is measured. In Buddhist practice, craving is observed. Both involve shaping behavior; one through influence, the other through awareness. What happens when those two meet? What happens when a system designed to influence meets a discipline devoted to watching the mind as it moves?
That’s what this week’s post is about: how advertising works in 2025. What’s happening beneath awareness? What we measure now, and what we miss.
The Long Arc of Influence
Persuasion has been around as long as language. Long before billboards and branding, influence moved through story, repetition, proximity, and tone. In the early 20th century, advertising began to formalize these tactics, shifting from simple product announcements to engineered emotional appeal. Edward Bernays, drawing from Freud, helped shape the modern landscape by connecting consumer behavior to unconscious drives.1
From there, the industry developed into what we now recognize as large-scale influence, using visual framing, associative messaging, selective emphasis, and eventually, behavioral targeting.
For a brief, accessible overview of this shift, I recommend this short video from Freethink on Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations: How advertising shifted from product to person. It offers a snapshot of how marketing began targeting the unconscious.
From Emotion to Measurement: The Rise of Neuromarketing
By the time the internet matured, advertising had already moved well beyond conscious argument. The goal was no longer to convince, but to create a feeling. To insert a product or idea into the stream of habitual thought, preference, and craving, without needing to be noticed. While Bernays helped define the emotional turn in advertising, contemporary neuromarketing has taken that foundation and built a measurable system around it. I encountered this shift directly as a media psychology doctoral student when I took a course with Christophe Morin, one of the field’s leading figures.
Bridging Neuroscience and Consumer Behavior
In Neuromarketing: The New Science of Consumer Behavior, Morin (2011) outlines how the field of neuromarketing emerged as a response to the limitations of traditional marketing research. Self-reports, focus groups, and surveys rely on conscious recall and interpretation, but much of what drives behavior happens before conscious awareness begins. Morin (2011) argues that neuromarketing offers a set of tools to study that early activity directly, using neuroscience to observe what people feel and process without needing them to explain it.2
How Neuromarketing Measures the Mind
Morin explains the primary tools used in neuromarketing: EEG, MEG, and fMRI. EEG measures electrical activity across the scalp and is especially useful for detecting fast, surface-level responses like emotional valence or attention shifts. MEG offers stronger spatial resolution but is less common due to cost. fMRI, which measures blood flow in the brain, provides the clearest window into deeper emotional and memory-related brain structures, though it works more slowly than EEG.
When I took Dr. Morin’s class, we studied the book he co-authored: The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, anywhere, anytime.3 In it, Morin and Renvoise (2018) describe advertising research as a multi-level inquiry, with the most immediate responses driven by subcortical systems—the "primal brain"—which operate largely outside conscious awareness (p. 31).
Together, Morin’s early theoretical work and his later applied framework highlight the shift from asking people what they think to observing what happens before thought forms. This shift, from conscious reflection to pre-conscious measurement, sets the stage for recent research that maps neuromarketing’s current scope. Studies over the past few years have expanded both the technical methods and the contexts where neuromarketing is applied, offering a clearer picture of how attention, emotion, and decision-making interact across domains.
Mapping the Field: What Neuromarketing Studies Reveal
Khondakar et al. (2024) conducted a systematic review of EEG-based Neuromarketing, focusing on research trends and technical scopes over the last seven years. Their paper identifies five clusters of popular research topics in Neuromarketing, highlighting current trends and methodologies, including: 1) ads and video commercials, 2) neuroscience in marketing, economics, and consumer behavior, 3) marketing strategies, 4) advertising message components, and 5) decision-making process and brand selection.4
Last week’s post focused on the rise of disordered eating, particularly concerning social media and the conditions it creates around body image, food exposure, and self-regulation.
While Khondakar et al. (2024) provide a broad overview of EEG-based neuromarketing trends, other studies are narrowing in on domains where marketing intersects with vulnerability, none more pressing than food. In an era when wellness is branded, indulgence is aestheticized, and “health” messaging is often layered with contradiction, the use of neuromarketing in food promotion raises important questions. How are brands tapping into emotional and sensory triggers to shape behavior? And what does this mean for populations already at risk, especially given last week’s focus on disordered eating and digital exposure?
Neuromarketing and Perceived Food-Choice
A recent study by Kislov et al. (2023) investigated whether brain activity could predict real-world food choices at the market level. Specifically, the researchers focused on neural signals from the ventral striatum (VS), a region associated with reward processing, to test whether activity in a small group of participants could forecast the popularity of menu items across an entire restaurant chain.5
Twenty-two participants underwent fMRI scanning while viewing images of 78 dishes, including names and prices. They indicated whether they would eat each dish and later completed questionnaires about preferences, price satisfaction, and familiarity. This neural and behavioral data was then compared to actual sales data from the restaurant over the following year.
The results showed a modest but statistically significant correlation (r = 0.28, p = 0.01) between ventral striatum activity and one-year sales. When combined with product details (price, weight), behavioral responses, and survey data, the predictive model improved substantially (R² = 0.33). Notably, the most effective predictions came from a functionally defined ROI in the ventral striatum, suggesting that domain-specific brain mapping is essential when using neuroforecasting for primary rewards like food.
While brain activity alone wasn’t enough to predict in-scanner choices, a combined model, including preference ratings and perceived value, explained up to 69% of choice behavior. The study reinforces the idea that neural activity linked to reward is not just theoretically interesting but practically predictive, especially when integrated with other forms of consumer data.
Brand Influence, Emotion, and Vulnerability
Vasile et al. (2024) conducted an interdisciplinary analysis discussing the influence of food promotion on consumer decisions, particularly regarding obesity and malnutrition in children and adolescents. They argue that understanding the connection between food promotion and buyer decisions is critical, especially for vulnerable populations.6
Their study examines how neuromarketing techniques are used to study food-related decision-making. It highlights the role of sensory input and emotional response in shaping behavior, particularly in response to advertising and packaging. Vasile et al. (2024) note that strong brands can influence consumer preferences and activate the frontal cortex, linked to executive functions, and their research indicates that neuromarketing could enhance advertising effectiveness without relying on conscious consumer feedback. Vasile et al. (2024) point to emotional and sensory factors that significantly influence purchasing behavior and dietary choices, emphasizing the importance of understanding feelings, memory, and reward systems in decision-making.
An Ethical Lens
The moral implications of neuromarketing revolve around its potential to manipulate behavior without conscious awareness, its need for privacy protections, and the obligation to safeguard vulnerable populations. Researchers like Khondakar et al. (2024) and Vasile et al. (2024) argue that while these tools offer profound insights into behavior, they also raise serious ethical concerns, especially when used in domains like food marketing, where unconscious persuasion can have lasting personal and social consequences.
The tools we have now (EEG, fMRI, eye tracking, real-time biometric feedback) can tell us a great deal about what draws attention, what stirs emotion, and what predicts behavior. But they can’t tell us what any of it means unless meaning is also being practiced. Neuromarketing gives us precision. Buddhist practice asks us to be honest about what precision serves.
Advertising in 2025 doesn’t just aim to inform; it aims to embed itself in the stream of perception, often before thought arises. That isn’t inherently harmful, but it’s not inherently neutral either. Systems designed to shape behavior don’t stop being systems just because the behavior looks like a choice.
So what happens when persuasion is met not with resistance, but with awareness? What shifts when craving is seen clearly, not judged or indulged, but known as it arises?
There’s no neat answer. But for those of us working in media psychology, Buddhist practice, or both, the task is the same: not to reject influence, and not to surrender to it, but to see it. Carefully. In full context. And maybe, sometimes, to step back far enough to ask what kind of flourishing we’re building underneath all the metrics.
References
Freethink. (2019, July 16). How advertising shifted from product to person | Edward Bernays and the birth of PR [Video]. YouTube.
Morin, C. (2011). Neuromarketing: The new science of consumer behavior. Society, 48(2), 131–135.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-010-9408-1
Morin, C., & Renvoise, P. (2018). The persuasion code: How neuromarketing can help you persuade anyone, anywhere, anytime. Wiley.
Khondakar, Md. F. K., Sarowar, Md. H., Chowdhury, M. H., Majumder, S., Hossain, Md. A., Dewan, M. A. A., & Hossain, Q. D. (2024). A systematic review on EEG-based neuromarketing: recent trends and analyzing techniques. Brain Informatics, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40708-024-00229-8
Kislov A, Shestakova A, Ushakov V, Martinez-Saito M, Beliaeva V, Savelo O, et al.
2023). The prediction of market-level food choices by the neural valuation signal. PLoS ONE 18(6): e0286648. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
Vasile, A., Martiniuc, C., DASCALESCU, G., Ciobîcă, A., & Mavroudis, I. (2024). Neuromarketing and food decisions: an interdisciplinary analysis of the influence of sensory and emotional stimuli on consumer behavior. Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists Series on Biological Sciences, 13(2), 91–100. https://doi.org/10.56082/annalsarscibio.2024.2.91
Fascinating to peek behind the curtain, beyond the "how to persuade" and into the "why it works". Advertising, particularly the spoken word, is much more subtle than it was just a few years ago. This article offers great insight as to what makes compelling messaging; whether or not the product being advertised is actually beneficial to the consumer is a whole 'nuther ball of wax. :-)