Advertising in your head
By Steve Dow | smh.com.au | 11 August
On the first floor of an unassuming terrace above a row of shops in Hawthorn, eight men and women are gathered. They have been recruited at random by an agency and are being paid about $65 each for the evening to wear plastic headsets that look a little like shower caps, and virtual reality-style visors over their eyes.
There are felt-tip sensors inside the bathing caps to measure the electrical activity in each person's brain. The lights go down, a screen comes up, and a show comes on. But the real show is inside these people's minds: advertisers and television networks want to know what makes this audience pay attention, what engages them and how much their memory will encode for the longer term.
Perhaps even more importantly, they also want to know the audience's emotional response: activity in a complex network of cortical and sub-cortical regions - particularly in the right side of the brain, often ascribed as the creative and emotional side compared to the rational, systemising left side - indicate both emotional intensity (how emotionally energised someone becomes) and emotional valence (the motivational state created by the emotion).
Welcome to the age of neuromarketing. It's a lot more complex than the old method of monitoring viewers' eye movements, and at prices starting at $45,000 to test 50 to 100 people, it's becoming the standard bearer of finding and refining advertising and TV hits. Its techniques, developed by Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology, promise to uncover viewing pleasures we may not care to admit.
Who knew for instance that Nine's daggy reality show Farmer Wants A Wife would engage young men, scoring 0.83 on a scale of 0 to 1, more than young women, who scored 0.6? The lowest ever engagement was 0.43, for a Seinfeld repeat.
Neuromarketing can also tell you which songs pull at the emotional strings: testing confirmed Climb Every Mountain was a great choice in some National Australia Bank ads, although the testing was done before recent interest rate rises hardened our aspirational hearts.
The techniques can also warn advertisers that their messages come in the wrong order. Test audiences for a frozen seafood commercial were engaged by a freeze frame of actor John Waters walking along the beach with seagulls flapping about, but the message placed immediately after that high - that the product used "fresh fish" - got lost in the moment. Some judicious editing ensued.
The technology is known as steady-state topography (SST), and was developed by a team led by Richard Silberstein, who says his most passionate work is applying his knowledge to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia and understanding human creativity.
Silberstein is also the chief executive of Neuro-Insight, the company that conducts the testing in Hawthorn. How does he feel about his SST technology being used for commercialism, rather than improving human health or wellbeing? "The original reason we established the company, when the university was involved in it, was that all governments want a return on taxpayers' research funding," he says.
"Australians are very good at basic and applied research, but we're nowhere near as good at turning that into a commercial endeavour that creates a tangible return.
"More generally, it's a matter of philosophy about the role of marketing in society. We live in a mixed economy which seems to work relatively well, better than some of the alternatives, and marketing is a part of that world." Silberstein points out that neuromarketing has also been used in anti-cancer commercials to refine messages to stop people smoking.
Surely playing on people's emotions puts undue pressure on them to spend? Neuro-Insight marketing director Peter Pynta disagrees. "You can't tell someone to buy something they normally wouldn't buy," he argues.
While the malleability of the consumer mind may be open to debate, Neuro-Insight has set itself some ethical guidelines. The company will not test children under 14, for instance, and only test children 14 and above with parental consent.
The company won't touch tobacco advertisers - Pynta says Neuro-Insight has knocked back tobacco companies that have approached it with commercials for testing - and will "not work on products or services which, when used as intended, demonstrably cause harm to people".
Such a definition leaves grey areas. Yes, say Silberstein and Pynta, they would test alcohol commercials, but not alcohol commercials that were aimed at teenagers. Nor would they touch the minefield of political party advertising - though surely it would not be long before other companies spring up offering similar technology with no such ethical boundaries?
Neuro-Insight says participants' anonymity is protected, and data does not get sold to third parties.
First published by Smh.com.au on August 11 2008
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