The Theatre of the Mind The RAB Media Facts Book on radio, reports that repeated studies show that "the ear is superior to the eye…people remember more if they hear words than if they see
them." The mind is able to understand a spoken word in 140 milliseconds, while it takes 180 milliseconds to understand the printed word. Psychologists believe this 40-millisecond delay occurs when
the brain attempts to translate visual data into aural sounds it can understand.
These same studies find that what you hear is retained longer in your memory than what you see. A visual image
fades in about one second, while an image received by the ear lasts four or five times as long. And, the Facts Book reports that scientific evidence strongly suggests that thinking is a process of
manipulating sounds, not images. As a result, you see what you hear — and what the sound has led you to expect to see — not what the eye tells you it has seen.
Consumers spend 85% of their time
with ear-oriented media, such as Radio, but spend only 15% of their time with such eye-oriented media as newspapers and magazines. But advertisers, according to this report, spend 55% of their
dollars on eye media (print) and only 45% of their dollars on ear media such as Radio and television. Additional research suggests that sound plays a far more crucial role in the effectiveness of TV
than many advertisers realize.
The payoff, as seen through the eyes of the radio industry, is a process called Imagery Transfer by which visual elements of a TV commercial or program are
transferred into the consumer’s mind by using a similar audio track in its Radio counterpart. Therefore a media plan that includes radio, in combination with the visual aspects of television, is said
to keep images fresh and top-of-mind
Read more here.