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Eating popcorn while watching movies makes us immune to advertising, a new study suggests.

A new study from Colonge University suggests that cinema advertising is far less effective when the targeted audiences eat popcorn and other snacks. It stops you from remembering the brand name too.

The research published in Journal of Consumer Psychology also suggest this “inner speech” can be disturbed by chewing. Clearly, it contrasts with previous studies that suggested chewing gum could help in retaining memory.

As the part of the study, researchers at Cologne University invited around 100 people. They were screened a movie which followed by number of advertisements.

48 of them were given popcorn and were shown genuine commercials of the products existing.

A week later, the participants of the study were invited to the laboratory where they were asked to rate the products among which some of them were advertised previously.

In the second study, 188 people were considered and were shown adverts in similar circumstances. They were then given money to donate to charity.

“The mundane activity of eating popcorn made participants immune to the pervasive effects of advertising,” said Sascha Topolinski, one of the researchers according to BBC.

“Particularly for novel brands, excessive exposure and repetition is necessary to establish the brand name in the first place,” wrote the authors.

“Remember your initial irritation upon encountering the names Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia for the first time; now they are imprinted in your brain,” they added.

Mr. Topolinski also suggested that advertisers should try to boycott popcorn.

“This finding suggests that selling candy in movie theatres actually undermines advertising effects, which contradicts present marketing strategies. In the future, when promoting a novel brand, advertising clients might consider trying to prevent candy being sold before the main movie, ” he said according to BBC.