The use of modern brain imaging techniques could be useful to understand what brain areas are involved in the observation of video clips related to commercial advertising, as well as for the support of political campaigns, and also the areas of Public Service Announcements (PSAs). In this paper we describe the capability of tracking brain activity during the observation of commercials, political spots, and PSAs with advanced high-resolution EEG statistical techniques in time and frequency domains in a group of normal subjects. We analyzed the statistically significant cortical spectral power activity in different frequency bands during the observation of a commercial video clip related to the use of a beer in a group of 13 normal subjects. In addition, a TV speech of the Prime Minister of Italy was analyzed in two groups of swing and “supporter” voters. Results suggested that the cortical activity during the observation of commercial spots could vary consistently across the spot. This fact suggest the possibility to remove the parts of the spot that are not particularly attractive by using those cerebral indexes. The cortical activity during the observation of the political speech indicated a major cortical activity in the supporters group when compared to the swing voters. In this case, it is possible to conclude that the communication proposed has failed to raise attention or interest on swing voters. In conclusions, high-resolution EEG statistical techniques have been proved to able to generate useful insights about the particular fruition of TV messages, related to both commercial as well as political fields. 1. Introduction Every day we are exposed to several solicitations for purchasing products, voting or supporting particular politicians and even improving our life style. Such pressure has become usual, being mediated by all the current media available, video, audio, and even internet. How and to what extent these messages could be detected and recognized by our brain is still not well understood. In fact, the study of brain responses to commercial and political announcements has been measured mainly by the hemodynamic responses of the different brain areas, by using the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging devices (fMRI). However, both the stimuli and the relative brain responses have rapidly shifting characteristics that are not tracked by the evolution of the hemodynamic blood flow, which usually lasts 4–6 seconds. Different brain imaging tools, mainly EEG and Magnetoencephalography, exhibit a sufficient time resolution to follow the brain
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