Mega-sporting events are always mega-advertising events, and the cost to become a sponsor or advertiser is a huge commitment of corporate dollars. The inevitable question that arises after the event is, “Was it worth it?” NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing research company, has released their “Beijing Brand Study” which attempts to answer that question for the 2008 Summer Olympics. One of the firm’s key measurement variables is “Brand Perception Lift,” which they define as “the degree to which certain specific brand attributes experience a gain in consumers’ subconscious associations with the brand.” (more…)
Articles about 'super bowl'
Fri 29 Aug 2008
Neuromarketing Firm Awards Olympic Gold to Visa, Home Depot
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research , BrandingNo Comments
Digg itMon 23 Jun 2008
Slate science writer Daniel Engber finds the concept of neuromarketing dubious, and in particular has a problem with FKF Applied Research. FKF has been particularly successful in getting highly visible press coverage of its interpretations of fMRI brain scans. That the conclusions reached are sometimes obvious and sometimes contradictory doesn’t seem to bother FKF nearly as much as it gets under Engber’s skin. The latest affront to Engber’s scientific sensibility was a lengthy piece in the Atlantic written by Jeffrey Goldberg (see Jeffrey Goldberg’s Brain). (more…)
Wed 18 Jun 2008
Ever wonder what goes on inside a journalist’s head when he thinks about politics, television shows, or his boss? An article in The Atlantic, My Amygdala, My Self, tells us that and more. The intro to the piece notes that correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg was “intrigued and alarmed” by the new concept of neuromarketing, and decided to enter an fMRI machine and have his brain scanned while he viewed videos and photos on a variety of topics. The scanning was done by FKF Applied Research, known for past rankings of Super Bowl ads.
Early in the article, there’s a nice point/counterpoint on the reliability of the interpretation of fMRI data:
Still, I wondered to what degree this was truly scientific and to what degree it was 21st-century phrenology. The columnist David Brooks, who is writing a book about the brain, encouraged my skepticism when I talked to him about this. “My fear is that this is like flying over Los Angeles at night, looking at the lights in the houses and trying to guess what people are talking about at dinner,” he said.
I mentioned Brooks’s doubts to the neuroscientist [Marco] Iacoboni, who dismissed them, but with a caveat. “This is not one-to-one mapping,” he said. “You have to interpret the data within the context of the brain activation. It’s not mathematical, but it can give you an amazing understanding of what lights up different parts of the brain.” Iacoboni, a world leader in the study of mirror neurons—cells in the brain that help us process the emotions and actions of other people (his new book, Mirroring People, has much to say about the connection between autism and “broken” mirror neurons)—told me that in order for his team to sift my brain comprehensively, I would have to spend a full week undergoing fMRI screening. But even an hour inside the machine would yield a baseline understanding of my neurological predispositions.
The tone of the article is breezy, and we learn that Goldberg’s brain seems to be a bit afraid of Jimmy Carter (whose book he just panned) but finds actress Edie Falco hot. (Some guilt showed up with Falco’s picture, too, no doubt because Goldberg was aware that people were peering inside his brain while he was appreciating the actress.) Some findings were unexpected, like a seeming positive reaction to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - an individual for whom Goldberg has little sympathy. The scientists tried to force-fit an explanation involving Goldberg’s anticipation that Ahmadinejad would eventually fall from power to explain his brain’s reaction, but that example showed the limitations of current brain scan interpretation.
All in all, the article doesn’t do much to boost neuromarketing credibility, but it’s highly readable and will definitely help readers unfamiliar with the area gain a better understanding of how neuromarketing practitioners ply their trade.
Tue 12 Feb 2008
Complete Neuro-Ranking of 2008 Super Bowl Ads
Posted by Roger Dooley under NeuromarketingNo Comments
Yesterday, I commented on Advertising Age’s 2008 Super Bowl ad coverage that included neuromarketing firm Sands Research and their EEG-based ad analysis (see Your Brain on Super Bowl Ads.) Sands has actually published a ranking of every single 2008 Super Bowl commercial based on the cumulative level of brain activation by each ad as measured by their EEG equipment. The ads which scored the highest and lowest are: (more…)
Mon 11 Feb 2008
For the last few years, while fans have been recovering from an excess of guacamole and sports analysts were explaining why the winning team actually prevailed (scored more points?), small teams of neuroscientists have been at work doing their own post-game analysis: measuring which ads lit up viewers’ brains. (I’ve written about some of the past efforts in Super Bowl Ads: Brain Dead and Super Bowl Ads: GoDaddy Girl 1, Neuroscientists 0.) For the 2008 Super Bowl, the ad analysis came from a new source: Advertising Age. Skeptical of neuromarketing in their most recent article, AdAge traveled to Batavia, Ohio, to watch neuromarketing startup Sands Research hook subjects up to electroencephalography machines as they viewed Super Bowl ads.
I was happy to see that my own technology-unaided pick for the best Super Bowl ad, the Coke “It’s Mine” spot (featuring giant parade balloons vying for an equally large floating Coke bottle), also scored as the one which produced the most EEG activity.
When watching spots for caffeinated and alcoholic beverages, your synapses fire and are fully engaged. When watching anti-drug spots, you come pretty close to flat-lining…
Sands found that subjects’ brain activity soared for Coke’s “It’s Mine” ad featuring Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons from Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., and Bud Light’s “Ability to Fly” ad from DDB Worldwide, Chicago.
But the fewest synapses fired for the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s ad from DraftFCB, New York, that showed a pusher’s lecture outside a pharmacy on the dangers of mom and dad’s prescription drugs. [From The Super Bowl Spots That Got Inside Consumers Heads.]
If there’s a cautionary note in this, it’s that mere brain activation levels don’t always indicate whether the ad accomplished its objective or not. Once again, in 2008 GoDaddy confounded the neurocritics. The Sands testing showed GoDaddy’s ad caused little brain activation, along with sexy ads from Victoria’s Secret and IceBreakers. GoDaddy, however, reported a massive 1.5 million web site visits by the time the game ended, with traffic continuing to pour in after the big event.
In short, don’t confuse brain activation with meeting your business objectives unless you have validated a particular response as significant for a desired outcome.
Still, it’s fun to go through the brain scan process with these costly and original ads, and we applaud AdAge and Jack Neff for doing so in a thoughtful manner.
Mon 4 Feb 2008
The Loser. The inevitable fMRI neuromarketing analyses of the 2008 Super Bowl ads hasn’t appeared yet, but I’ve got my pick for the worst: Planters Nuts spot showing a hideous-looking woman who seemed amazingly attractive to those around her. This sounds like a good scenario for a perfume, perhaps… through most of the commercial, one has no clue as to what is being advertised. Then, in the closing seconds, we see how the woman became so magnetic: by rubbing herself with Planters cashews.
(more…)
Wed 23 Jan 2008
Keith Winter was named CEO at Emsense, a neuromarketing company that uses EEG and other technology to measure consumer response to media and ads. Winter had previously held the COO slot at Exponential Interactive, an Internet advertising company. Web marketers might recognize Exponential’s previous name, Tribal Fusion, a bit more readily. Previously, Winter held C-level positions at Marketron International, Inc. and Electronic Arts Seattle.
Emsense is targeting the advertising, video gaming, and political markets for its services. Subject responses are measured using a lightweight headset that records EEG activity. The headset also includes sensors that Emsense says measure breathing, blinking, physical motion, heart activity, and even blushing.
Presumably, Winter’s EA experience will dovetail with Emsense’s efforts to penetrate the video game industry. In addition, his Web advertising experience could improve the company’s focus on that area. Web advertising seems to have been largely overlooked by most neuromarketers. To a degree, this is understandable - a single Super Bowl ad costs $3 million this year, which dwarfs entire Web marketing campaigns. Nevertheless, the Web is the fastest growing ad segment, and is certainly deserving of some neuromarketing attention. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Tim Koogle, former chairman and founding CEO of Yahoo! Inc., is an EmSense angel investor and board member.
Fri 2 Nov 2007
Advertising Age revisits neuromarketing, this time in the form of a blog post by Jonathon Feit, Neuromarketing and Diversity Go Hand-in-Hand. Writing about the 2007 American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton (nice work, if you can get it…), Feit posits:
Neuromarketing — assuming its science can be translated into a meaningful technology — would finally enable marketers to reach out and pinprick consumers not using broad strokes like geography; not even using concentric criteria like demographic and psychographic information within a geographic area.
Rather, imagine the implication of knowing one’s customer at the deepest biological level! To do so is necessarily to recognize the biological commonalities that define Homo Sapiens — and at the same time, to wend through the labyrinth of upbringing, education, genetic proclivity and emotion that comprises each individual’s quintessential uniqueness.
The endgame of neuromarketing would enable a seemingly paradoxical celebration of diversity at the most fundamental, humanistic levels, tucked inside a double-helix of commonality. It would provide proof-positive that, for all our differences, we are built (and function) in largely the same way.
That’s an intriguing idea, but I fear that it may give neuromarketing a bit too much credit. My concern isn’t that neuromarketing will show that everyone harbors racist tendencies (although Malcom Gladwell’s Blink suggests that even the most open-minded people have subliminal reactions that differ in response to different races).
Rather, just as the search for a “buy button” is doomed, so are searches for universal common ground in reaction to advertising. Our brains aren’t like personal computers that come pre-loaded with standard firmware and software. They have been developing since birth, and have been heavily influenced by family, society, education, culture, experience, and everything else in the surrounding world. Our brains are plastic (in the sense that they can change), too - the brain will rewire itself in respose to injury or even activities like music training.
Hence, I think it unlikely that neuroscientists will find that we are really all the same inside our skulls. People who react differently on the surface to advertising or other media will no doubt be found to have different patterns of activity in their brains. While superficial similarities will be (and already are) evident, in most cases I think marketers will do what they have done in the decades before neuromarketing: study our differences to target their ads more effectively. Of course, sometimes it could be useful to look for common ground: Super Bowl ads, for example, will be viewed by an extremely diverse cross-section of society.
One shouldn’t dismiss Feit’s suggestion out of hand. It is entirely possible that in some cases neuromarketing studies could show more useful customer segmentation strategies than groupings based on simple racial and ethnic characteristics. I’m an optimist, as Feit seems to be, and I hope he is right.
Tue 13 Mar 2007
Long Tail Neuromarketing
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience and Marketing BooksNo Comments
One of the more interesting marketing books in recent years is The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
The cost of brain scan studies will come down, though, and their effectiveness will improve. As the quantity and quality of data starts to improve, I think marketers will be able to get beyond picking a single winner. Certainly, choosing one or two really effective ads will continue to be a major use of scans, along with trying to optimize some particular characteristing of an ad (the sexiest, the most heartwarming, etc.) We’re also believers in using neuro-studies much earlier in the process: designing the product and choosing between alternative features, configurations, designs, etc. It is in this process where marketers and product designers eventually should be looking beyond the most popular choice. Some configurations may not seem to “turn on” large numbers of subjects, but will produce a strong positive reaction from a few subjects, or even just one. These positive reactions may indicate a long tail marketing opportunity (or even a major secondary one).
Long tail marketing is all about offering vast choice as well as an effective way to sort through all of the options. Effective long tail marketers like Netflix and Amazon use collaborative filtering, recommendation engines, user reviews, and similar techniques to help identify a few appropriate items for a particular user. This certainly seems antithetical to neuromarketing, which seems to be all about optimizing one choice for mass consumption. An interesting area of study, though, would be to learn more about the altruistic impulses which drive users to take their time to enhance the experience of others by rating movies, writing book reviews, commenting on hotels, and so on. There has been a bit of work on altruism (see Altruism Research), but not much that would help long tail marketers build stronger communities. Of course, it’s entirely possible that altruism doesn’t much enter into some of this user effort - perhaps lengthy book reviews, for example, are driven more by the user’s ego rather than a desire to help others choose the right book.
In short, at the moment, neuromarketing doesn’t seem to have much light to shed on long tail efforts, though both are important concepts… it seems like any useful meeting of these areas will be in the future. Do you agree?
Wed 7 Mar 2007
Viral Video and Neuromarketing
Posted by Roger Dooley under Neuromarketing , Neuroscience Research1 Comment
One of the hottest marketing techniques in the last year has been viral video - create a clever enough video segment, and with minimal promotion it can reach a Super Bowl ad-sized audience for a tiny-fraction of the cost. The trick is creating a video engaging enough to “go viral”, i.e., induce viewers to forward it to their friends. Now, a study has tried to use a neuromarketing approach to identify videos with viral potential:
…The research respondents were asked to observe eleven viral videos, which were pre-rated by the site’s community members on a scale of 1 to 10, to test the hypothesis that neuroscience informed measures of media engagement could accurately predict the ratings that the NewGrounds online community pre-assigned to the viral content.
In order to test the level of emotional engagement of each respondent, each was outfitted with a state-of-the-art garment with embedded biometric sensors that Innerscope uses to non-invasively measure physiologic manifestations of brain activity. While wearing this garment, the respondents observed the eleven viral videos and their biological responses, including skin conductivity, heart rate, respiration, motion and eye tracking, were captured.
“Once the data was collected we processed it through an algorithm developed for the purpose of deriving a single measure of emotional engagement,” said Dr. Carl Marci, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Innerscope Research. “Specifically the algorithm determines synchrony, or the degree to which an audience’s state uniformly changes when exposed to a media stimulus, and intensity, the cumulative strength of physiologic response to the media stimulus.” (Press Release)
The researchers, from by One to One Interactive and Innerscope Research, report that they were able to predict the popularity ranking of the videos with 77% accuracy purely from the physiological data collected. It’s easy to see why this would be useful - subjects could be shown different edits of the same video, or different videos, to determine which were most likely to go viral. A final “optimized” video could then be released and subtly promoted.
Notably, the study did not use the tool most commonly associated with neuromarketing and neuroeconomics studies, an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. While fMRI scans provide interesting detail of brain activity in (more or less) real time, they are big, expensive machines that few researchers have access to. The position of the subject and the intense magnetic fields also limit the ways that subjects can be exposed to and interact with content. A cheaper, non-invasive testing approach with good predictive ability would be a boon to neuromarketers in areas where the approach was shown to be effective.
I think it would be interesting to try to identify particular individuals whose reactions seemed to be above average in predictive ability. I’m sure in an given test, a particular viral video caused a range of reactions among the subjects. That’s a general characteristic of neuromarketing, and is why we are unlikely to ever see “super ads” that turn consumers into mindless drones. Still, I’d guess that enough testing would identify certain individuals whose reactions correlated more highly with real-world viral performance than those of other individuals.
One wonders how long it will be before Hollywood starts wiring up test audiences to make movies scarier, funnier, more romantic, etc. One suspects they already are, but if so, why do they keep releasing a significant number of movies that die at the box office?
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