Making people feel: the power that sets remembered brands apart

Think of the last time a thirty-second film made you swallow hard. You were probably on the couch, phone in hand, with no intention of being moved. The music came in softly, someone on screen made a small, almost ordinary gesture, and your chin tightened on its own. Your lower lip rose a little. Your throat asked for a moment of silence. Years later, the whole scene still comes back when that song plays on the car radio. We wrote this series about that moment and about what it is worth to your brand.

Making people feel: the tool that lives in the viewer's body

Emotion happens in the body. The heart changes its rhythm, the eyes sting, the breath gets shorter, the skin on the arm prickles. Nobody decides to feel this in front of an ad. The person only notices afterward, with a warm face and a little embarrassed at having been moved by a commercial. This involuntary reaction gives emotion the power it has in communication.

When your brand makes someone feel, it enters a memory that has a smell, a soundtrack and a face. It comes to sit on the same shelf as the grandmother who baked cornmeal cake, the first bus trip alone, the father waving at the gate. People keep these brands the way they keep old photographs, without realizing they are keeping them. Kept this way, the brand has a better chance of being remembered in the supermarket aisle, when it is time to choose a bank, in the conversation where someone asks for a recommendation.

Here at Mentoniano, we start from this conviction, and over twelve articles we will back it up with studies, numbers and documented cases. Messages that touch people tend to stay in memory, and a brand needs to be remembered to become part of someone's routine. The science that supports this idea has important nuances, and we will show each of them with the same care we give to the arguments in our favor.

Screen saturation: 56,000 brands competing for the same gaze

Brazil's numbers show the scale of the competition. According to DataReportal's Digital 2026: Brazil report, the country has 185 million internet users, 86.9% of the population. Kantar IBOPE Media's Inside Video survey, with 2024 data published by Meio & Mensagem, shows that video reaches 99.5% of Brazilians. That same year, 56,000 brands invested in video advertising.

Read that last number slowly. Fifty-six thousand brands paid to appear on the same screen a person uses to see a photo of their nephew, listen to a voice message from their boss and look up the price of a medicine. Worldwide, DataReportal's global report estimates well over two and a half hours a day spent on social and video feeds. If you work with brands, you know the current of this river.

On any given night, at eleven thirty, with the house dark, the thumb scrolls down the feed at a speed that has become a reflex. A recipe goes by, a podcast clip, a dance video, three ads with the same trendy soundtrack and the same sentence written on the screen. The thumb only stops when something hits the chest: a familiar voice, a kitchen like the one from childhood, a silence in the middle of the noise. In that second of pause, a brand gets the chance to exist in someone's life.

In our view, which the third article examines in light of research on attention, content that merely repeats formulas and trends usually goes by without leaving a trace. It fulfills the content plan, fills the posting calendar and dissolves before the next swipe of the finger. This is an interpretation supported by studies on memory, and we will present it as such, with the caveats the evidence calls for.

Emotion and memory: what touches us is forgotten more slowly

Neuroscience gives solid ground to the writer's intuition. In a review published in 2015 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Andrew Yonelinas and Maureen Ritchey state that the literature indicates emotional memories are forgotten more slowly than neutral ones. The authors themselves note the limits: most of the evidence comes from negative, arousing material, and the mechanism behind the effect is still under discussion.

There is another caveat that matters directly to you as an advertiser. A 2005 study by Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues describes how emotion can narrow attention to the center of the scene and leave peripheral details in the shadows. The viewer remembers the character crying and may miss the logo in the corner of the screen. That is why the emotion needs to be woven into the brand, inside the story, and the second article of the series covers this point carefully.

Mentoniano: the chin muscle that gives this series its name

Mentoniano is the name of a small muscle at the tip of the chin. According to the anatomy platform Kenhub, it raises and protrudes the lower lip, wrinkles the skin of the chin and takes part in expressions of sadness, contempt and doubt. It is the pouting muscle.

If you have ever seen someone get emotional up close, you know the movement. The chin puckers, forms small dimples and trembles for a second before the first tear. Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent who writes about body language in Psychology Today, noted that the chin often reveals that we are about to cry. This is his own observation, with no study cited. There is no peer-reviewed research confirming chin trembling as a marker of crying, so we treat the chin as an image: precise and familiar to anyone who pays attention to faces.

Léo Bento, our founder and scriptwriter, chose this image to name Mentoniano and explains the choice this way:

From here on, one question accompanies each article: did the viewer's chin move? It applies to the Christmas film, the factory's corporate video, the president's speech at the convention and Tuesday's post. It is an uncomfortable question, and that discomfort helps, because it makes you imagine the face of the person who will watch when it is time to approve a script.

The excerpt works because it hands viewers a scene they already know: a son far from home, on the phone, reassuring his mother with a memory of her cooking. The viewer's imagination fills in the rest: the kitchen, the pot on the stove, the longing of the one who stayed behind. That silent work by the audience is how a message turns into a memory.

What the series The power of making people feel will show

In the second article, we explain what neuroscience already knows about emotion and memory, from the amygdala to the vivid memories that deceive us. The third deals with screen overload, debunks two often-repeated myths about attention and shows what research says about repetition. The fourth brings together effectiveness studies, from Binet and Field to Kantar, with the caveats of each. The fifth covers mental availability, a brand's ability to come to mind at the moment of purchase. The sixth asks whether it is possible to fall in love with a brand and presents what research calls brand love.

The seventh and eighth tell the stories of films that moved the world and Brazil, with the results reported by the brands themselves and care to separate reach from sales. The ninth examines the risk of manufactured feeling, when emotion sounds fake and the audience notices. The tenth shows how the peak and the end of a story decide what stays in memory. In the eleventh, we open the workshop of those who write to touch people, and in the twelfth we tell you what it is like to work with a scriptwriter who writes to make people feel.

Every day, on some couch in the country, someone will feel their chin tighten in front of a screen. We wrote this series to help you place your brand inside that scene.