Shocker: Surprising Ads Work

Gary Stein points at a recent study outlining a statitical model for surprise.

[Researchers] Itti and Baldi work out a way of applying [probabilty] to the data in a video stream, providing a measure of how observing new data will affect the set of beliefs an observer has developed about the world on the basis of data previously received. "Data that does not change your beliefs is not surprising," says itti.

What ads and websites have changed your worldviews? Did you realize the change when it occured?