This research investigated how neuromarketing can improve and determine the effectiveness of action-based public health and social cause marketing communications with social amplification platforms. Action-based advertisements (Ferrier, Ward, & Palermo, 2012) aim to encourage consumers to ‘act’, ‘share’, make a ‘pledge’ or complete a ‘challenge’ for a public health or social cause. Public health messages as non-commercial advertisements attempt to change public behaviour (Vecchiato, Cherubino, Trettel, & Babiloni, 2013). Research was conducted using a 64 channel EEG wet cap with electrodes placed according to the international 10/20 system (Gountas et al., 2014; Treleaven-Hassard et al., 2010). The study applied an exploratory design which involved 4 tasks where participants viewed 7 advertisements (6 action-based, 1 control) and their logos while EEG was recorded. Preliminary LORETA results from the first five seconds of the most effective advertisement indicated approach responses due to left prefrontal and right parietal cortex activation (Davidson & Irwin, 1999; Vecchiato et al., 2013). Results suggest that consumer’s decision making about an advertisement occurs within the first five seconds of viewing an advertisement.

• Joanne M Harris(Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
• Joseph Ciorciari(Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
• John Gountas(Murdoch University, Australia)