Reading the Consumer Mind
The age of neuromarketing has dawned.
By Douglas Rushkoff, (c) NyPress.com, Feb. 2004. Douglas Rushkoff is a member of the CCLE's Board of Advisors. Learn more about him here.
By now, most of us in the appropriately concerned corners have heard at least something about Emory University’s neuromarketing research center, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences. The latest innovation in a never-ending quest to decode consumer behaviors, the institute uses Emory University Hospital’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to scan the brains of human subjects on behalf of corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, K-mart and Home Depot.
Of course, this goes against the grain for any of us still old enough, or conscious enough, to recognize the difference between marketing and culture. We are already living in a world where the colors of wallpaper, the textures of carpet and the scents pumped through ventilation systems are concocted to alter our mood, change our gait and make us bring more items to the checkout line. Our children recognize McDonald’s and Nike logos before they can read, and our teens are suffering from more advertising-related psychological diseases every year–from diabetes and anorexia to attention deficit disorder and alcoholism.
So, yes, the thought of a once-respected university surrendering its MRI equipment, psychiatrists and addiction experts to an advertising agency in order for them to mine deep into our pre-conscious neural patterns and speak directly to our reptilian brains is disconcerting, to say the least. It represents both the decline of American academic integrity and the rather unlimited reach of marketing into the most private realms of human thought and emotion. If this stuff works, the bottom line of the corporate balance sheet could very well become the arbiter of reality–or at least the way we perceive it.
Therein lies my concern with this line of thought: Does this stuff work? As an analyst of the persuasion business, I have always been less impressed by new marketing technologies than I am by the ways in which they are sold. Just as much effort goes into rationalizing the process of choosing a new color for a cola can as that which goes into actually picking the color. The process is the product. For in their relentless effort to get into the mind of the consumer and to compete for attention in an increasingly crowded media space, corporations will do and pay pretty much anything to gain an edge. They race from one advertising agency to another as each promises a yet more direct avenue toward the emotional control knob at the center of human decision-making. Touting a product has nothing to do with it. No one advertises about "brand attributes" anymore. This is the age of for loftier concepts such as "brand relationship" and "brand experience." Today, marketing takes place inside our heads.
The simple craft of describing what a product does and taking some nice pictures of it has been replaced by the voodoo of emotional logic and cognitive imprinting. Of course, the more mysterious a marketing strategy, the more that can be charged for it, and the longer before the client figures out it’s just the same old thing–advertising–with a new three-ring binder of market research or scientific studies backing it up.
That’s why, oddly enough, the current spate of protest against Emory University’s pathetic sell-out of psychiatry to the highest bidder actually aids BrightHouse in its efforts to gain some credibility for its as-yet unproven research methodology. (Does it really take a brain scan to prove that an adolescent boy might respond sexually to Britney Spears? Or that the taste of candy corn reminds someone of Halloween?) Ralph Nader’s advertising watchdog group, Commercial Alert (commercialalert.org), sent a letter to the government’s Office for Human Research Protections requesting an investigation of the BrightHouse Institute on public health grounds. The letter certainly makes sense, and any effort to curtail the reach of marketers into our lives and the lives of our children should be supported.
What bothers me, though, is that such protests seem to take BrightHouse’s specious claims at face value. The underlying assumption is that neuromarketing will actually work–or that it will work better than simply playing an ad in front of a thousand kids and seeing whether it makes them cry, "I want that!"
Commercial Alert’s letter is quick to cite Forbes magazine, which has called neuromarketing the pursuit of "a buy button inside the skull." Indeed, in a 2002 press release, BrightHouse claimed it would use science "to identify patterns of brain activity that reveal how a consumer is actually evaluating a product, object or advertisement…to help marketers better create products and services and to design more effective marketing campaigns."
BrightHouse has since adjusted its website, adding an ethics section that completely contradicts the press release by claiming the institute won’t use its technologies "to help companies modify the physical properties of products, design advertising campaigns, or determine likes and dislikes for ads/products."
The point here is not whether BrightHouse researchers will apply their technologies to packaging or ad campaigns. (Of course they will; they’re an advertising agency.) BrightHouse’s real victory here has been to sell the underlying assumption that its "NeurostrategiesTM" is such a powerful tool to begin with. The protest, and their reaction, has allowed them to behave as though they had the next weapon of mass destruction in their possession. This may prove to have been the biggest marketing coup of all.
A decade or so from now, I suspect we will regard neuromarketing researchers and their techniques the way we regard phrenologists or blood-letters today. And we’ll realize that the only people who ended up being hypnotized by their wares were the daft corporate executives who paid for them.
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/R ... eting.html
So, it's been a decade since Rushkoff wrote those words. Was he right? or has this technology and our understanding of the brain progressed?
Previous related thread:
Wombaticus Rex » Mon Nov 15, 2010 1:09 am wrote:Here's the thing about neuro-marketing: it sounds menacing and sophisticated. It's actually a horseshit buzzword. It's just ad testing + using fMRI and EEG. That definitely needed it's own term, right?
The Empty Hype of Political "Neuromarketing"
Neuromarketing neuromarketing?
http://www.thinkbrighthouse.com/
How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot
By Scott Brown
January 25, 2010
Here’s a typical “date night” with me and Hollywood: I don’t know what I want to see. Neither does Hollywood. But it bangs on my eyeballs and eardrums like Stanley Kowalski anyway. Sometimes I come away from the multiplex reasonably satisfied; other times I’m bummed beyond measure. It’s like some endless, brutal visit to the optometrist: This explosion or that explosion? This superintelligent shark or that zombie anaconda? It’s all so clumsy, so imprecise. Which is why I’m thrilled to learn that Hollywood has found a way to improve its hit rate. Not with better filmmaking — God forbid, we don’t want artistry gumming up our popcorn flicks — but with science. Get ready for the optimized moviegoing experience, where every instant is calculated to tickle your neural G-spot — all thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, soon to be every director’s new best friend.
That’s the dream of MindSign Neuromarketing, a fledgling San Diego firm with an ambitious, slightly Orwellian charter: to usher in the age of “neurocinema,” the real-time monitoring of the brain’s reaction to movies, using ever-improving fMRI technology. The company uses the scanning technique to track blood flow to specific areas (especially the amygdalae, those darling little almonds of primal emotion) while a test subject watches a movie. Right now, the metrics are pretty crude, but in theory, studios could use fMRI to fine-tune a movie’s thrills, chills, and spills with clickwheel ease, keeping your brain perpetually at the redline. MindSign cofounder Philip Carlsen said in an NPR interview that he foresees a future where directors send their dailies (raw footage fresh from the set) to the MRI lab for optimization. “You can actually make your movie more activating,” he said, “based on subjects’ brains.”
MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots: One of its “videographs,” mapped over a trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, clearly shows viewers’ brains lighting up whenever a monkey appears onscreen. (Of course, if there’s one thing we don’t need a computer to tell us, it’s that monkeys are funny.) Now the company wants to replace that ancient analog heuristic, the dreaded focus group. Carlsen claims that focus group members not only misrepresent the likes and dislikes of the broader population — they can’t even articulate their own preferences. Often, they’ll tell a human researcher one thing while the fMRI reveals they’re feeling the opposite.
Neurocinema helpfully speeds up a process Hollywood began years ago, namely the elimination of all subjectivity in favor of sheer push-button sensation. By quantifying which set pieces, character moments, and other modular film packets really lather up my gray matter, the adfotainment-industrial complex can quickly and efficiently deliver what I actually want. Movies won’t be “made,” they’ll be generated. Michael Bay, with access to my innermost circuitry, can really get in there and noogie the ol’ pleasure center. And here’s the best part: Once the biz knows what I want, it can give me more of the same. I’ll soon be reporting levels of consumer satisfaction previously known only to drug abusers. My moviegoing life will, literally and figuratively, be all about the next hit.
“But now movies will be more formulaic than ever!” purists whine. Au contraire, aesthete scum. “Formula” is for suckers. It implies narrative — peaks and valleys. What MindSign seems to be offering is a new model — not formulaic, but fractal. Forget ups and downs, suspense and release. What if every moment were a spike, every scene “trailer-able”? In fact, movies will become essentially a series of trailers, which, incidentally, are far better-loved than the oft-crummy features they encapsulate. Movie houses will become crack dens with cup holders, and I’ll lie there mainlining pure viewing pleasure for hours. Why not? I can’t decide what I want to watch anyway. Luckily, Hollywood is there to make those tough choices for me. And to show me the zombie shark I never even knew I was dying to see.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/pl_brown_gspot/
Braaaains
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU ... 2p7nScbUCw
Many of us here are cinema junkies. These are profoundly mind altering experiences. My own subjective impression of today's hollywood output as it compares with that of my childhood is the way that crack compares with coffee. Is there no neuro technology being utilized to create these astounding neurochemical joyrides? And is it necessarily a bad thing if there is, apart from the fact that I always ought to be doing something better with my time?
