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fMRI + Marketing = Consumer Control?
anonomouse writes "NYT magazine has an interesting article on the use of neuro-imagery in marketing. Best (old) quote: 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half'. Good, bad, whatever? Does this bode well for job opportunities for the new crops of cognitive systems graduates? Most importantly, what does brain state tell us about behavior, if anything?"
Here
groups of people chained to chairs, brains plugged and wired to big machines, having to watch publicity for hours... no wonder the population is goind mind numb, dude.
It was like, beep, blink, and like, pooof, I didn't have to think anymore..
Maybe they should study the brains of the people who decide to make the first post and do nothing but prove how immature they are.
Somehow I think 50 million years to human evolution has both bred people who can convince others to do what they want and people resistant to that appeal that in both cases will be no match for any analytical approach to dissecting human puchasing habits.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
& might prevent you from being duped again&again buy phonIE felonious greed/fear based payper liesense FudgePacker(tm) execrable, who use your money, to reduce yOUR choices, & in a not so roundabout way, kill babies.
get the picture?
Looker
Watch it.
Learn it. Love it. Live it..
A /. will analyze adds different. He/She will:
1. See if they can use the product being advertise.
2. Check if there is a free alternative.
3. Check Google/Google groups for negative comments about the product.
4. Search Google/Google groups for competitive product.
6. Do an on-line merchant price comparison.
5. Check their bank account balance on-line and see if they have dough. Some of them will actually start doing spread sheet calculation to see how it fits to the overall monthly budget.
6. Buy the product if it is deemed worthy.
Your average Joe on the other hand will:
1. See and add while watching Survivor.
2. Think the product is very good because the add was cool.
3. Go out and buy the product the next day.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
big boobies
soft boobies
big, bouncing boobies
with nipples
cleavage
girls with big tits in bikini
tits and ass
now that's advertising!
Advertising has a large unconscious component; anyone who has lived in this modern world for any stretch of time knows that. This is just the first time (probably not even) that it's been documented with medical evidence. Advertisers have been researching the psychological effects of color, motion, music, and so on for decades; it's no surprise they'd eventually switch to modern instruments instead of having focus groups respond verbally or in writing.
When I fist saw the title, I thought, "Good news, consumers are getting back some control". Then I read the rest of the article and was confused for a moment.
It seems that technology is becoming more and more...invasive is the wrong word, never the less its the only one that comes to mind. There are so few area's of life that have not been affected by technology. This is another example of how wide spread and diversified technology has become. I'll reserve my judgement on whether this is a good or a bad thing, but to much dependance on anything is never a good thing.
Lines of thinking that lead to Terminator style future scenarios are probably paranoid on my part but at this point in time a technological failure on a widespread basis would cripple not just the US economy but economies world wide. It's part of the price that we pay for globalization.
fMRIs only say there is significant activity above some baseline. It does not always equate to thoughts, processes, etc. Refer to this comment for an example.
I've got bad news for the marketting people out there -- they waste a lot more than half their marketing budget. I bet 90% of the advertisements I see are completely useless to me.
Although it goes one layer closer to the source, fMRI has the same flaw as any other lie-detector system (which this basically acts as, except that instead of detecting lies, they want to detect the far less tangible "appeal" of a given advertisement).
With the classic lie detectors, you can trick them out simply by clenching the muscles in your butt - This causes a drastic spike in blood pressure, galvanic skin response goes nuts - basically all the classic indicators of stress become totally random.
With fMRI, or PET, or any other "direct" brain imaging technology, a comparable technique exists - Think about sex. Thanks to our brain's hard-wired affinity for reproduction, thinking about sex will completely dominate over most other brain activity. Think graphically. Think in pictures. Try to imagine smells, tastes, what the tolerably hot-in-a-geeky-way research assistant looks like naked, whatever. This will guarantee the results end up totally meaningless.
Any other strong emotion will work as well, but for most people, thinking about sex comes easiest to fake.
...and if people need it, they'll buy it. Advertisers need to quit trying so hard to lie, deceive, and manipulate people. Then they need to all kill themselves in the most painful way possible.
Just make a friggin product that does what it's supposed to do, works well, and doesn't break after 90 days. Word of mouth is the only legitimate form of advertising, and you have to earn that through the merit of your product... you can't buy it.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
is in the hands of the customer. If he choose not to exercise self-control, that's also his choice. But he has a choice.
I don't watch TV so I don't see ads. I also use web browser that disables ads and popups. Advertising is usually annoying, and we've known for a very long time it's also manipulative!
Anyway it all comes down to choice in the end. Free will. Good stuff!
fMRI is a great research technique -- I've worked with it for years -- but I think that zealous companies that want to find the best way to tickle comsumers' brains are going to be pretty disappointed in fMRI as a marketing research tool. (And at $400+/hr, their disappointment is going to cost them . .
What these companies want is to be able to look at a scan of someone viewing/thinking about their product and to then be able to say, "Aha, he really wants this!", or, "She is debating on whether shee needs this," or even perhaps, "This product makes him feel secure."
That's bullshit -- its mindreading -- and given what we know about the brain and the signals that can be read in an fMRI, it can't be done. Perhaps one day, far in the future, something like that will be possible. Right now, though, people are still debating what exactly it means (in terms of neural activity) when you see a brain region "light up" in an fMRI scan. And even if we could know how exactly fMRI signals and neural activity relate, there's still a
-q
The avarage Joe uses spellcheckers while the avarage /.'er doesn't.
All I know is that there's ads in pissers all over NYC.
This morning I woke up, hung over, and a strange desire to switch over to Cingular's 1000 Minute with rollover plan.
So many studies are done about consumer behavior and advertisers' tactics and, yet, consumers behave exactly as they did before. For example, research by Elizabeth Loftus at UCI has shown that advertisers like Disney routinely implant memories into us. In one of her studies, subjects even believes that they had seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Even after this was widely reported by the media, Disney ads have stayed the same and are still as likely to "fall prey" to them.
Obviously, the benefits to advertisers and consumers are quite asymmetrical from all this research. Advertisers can actually refine their techniques and perhaps learn new ones. Consumers, on the other hand, may be a little more educated but they certainly are more easily seduced. While this is not absolutely bad and may even be good in some ways, the fact remains that with increasingly power research tools like fMRI mentioned here, the potential for corporations to absolutely manipulate us increases. I'm sure that things will work out in the future, as they have always done. However, research into "defenses" against memory implantation, et al does need to be conducted.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
I don't think a spell checker would catch "add."
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Why are you North Americans (not Canadians) using NYT all the time for "information"? There are other sources for information (even in US), and no, Fox News don't qualify.
Most importantly, what does brain state tell us about behavior, if anything?
For most men, nothing. You really need to be looking a little further south for the control center.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It seems like what this can do now is to say to Coke "yes, your branding scheme has worked." But Coke already knows that - that's why they're beating Pepsi in the market. This is also unhelpful because it's a test of what *has worked over time*, not what *will work over time*. What is being measured is the impression Coke has made over the people in the test over the course of their lives.
The problem with this is that it doesn't tell Pepsi what to do to get the same results. Pepsi can't sit in the lab and tweak their image until they get the same results, because what's being measured isn't the effectiveness of a new image, but the degree of recognition of a well-known image.
fMRI doesn't tell you what neurons do with any spatial or temporal accuracy.
See this paper:
The authors find that:
* fMRI gives you a really strong signal in the blood vessels
* Less than 50% of the time, when you average the neural activity over several SECONDS (an action potential lasts 0.015s), and over 1 cubic CENTIMETER (containing 10^8 neurons), fMRI tells you something about that average activity. Only problem is: we know that this averaging can work in SI, the brain area studied in the paper. For other brain areas, who knows?
Not to mention the issues with statistics in fMRI.
There are a very few groups doing good MRI studies, e.g. Heeger, Boynton, but they study humans doing relatively simple things.
Marketing is NOT simple. Marketing + fMRI = crap.
This is my general take on the technology too, and I've done some work with it also.
I see it as much like the mapping of the genome. It gets at the basics but we still don't know much about how the basic building blocks interact. The basic building blocks are the easy part. The interactivity, and non-linear relationship between things is where we don't even have a clue. And that's far more complex than the scratching of the surface we're doing right now.
Its PET or fMRI for functional scans. If i understand it correctly with MRI there are two clear advantages over PET scanners:
1. no radio-active agent is needed, and
2. the radiologists get the functional as well as the anotomical details- the flesh and its function, to say vulgalrly.
With the latest 3D imaging tools available with diagnostic machines its easy for the neuro-surgeons to plan the surgeries to much better detail.
Marketing is another issue. Obviously the customers are either radiologists or neuro-surgoens. The two people are tuned to their professional habits. It would be hard for the marketing/sales people to cause the change. My opinion is that companies need a pack of very good application-specialists. Application-specialists are breed of people who not only understand how the phased-array coils work but can also explain the C, T and L spine to the radiologists with equivalent ease! So maybe the diagnostic companies focus on their applicaiton-specialists instead of wasting too much on ads etc. Pure marketing/sales skills will not be enough for such a specialized tool.
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
ewe should reed yore massage* after you right it . . . . . . and not rely on a spell checker to keep you from commiting homophone suicide.
And yes, it IS homophone, NOT homonym.
* Massage, as in "And now a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister."
Since advertising is a tax writeoff, advertisers don't care that they waste 90% of their budgets, it's not their money they're wasting, it's YOUR money.
I absolutely agree. I think that basic psychology has done alot for marketing, and if you want to develop a product that is desiriable, basic psych is what you should use -- not a scanner.
As usual, Neal Stephenson beatchya there ;)
"You'll be hearing from me again very soon, I'm sure."
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Perhaps, while we're doing studies, we should study the psychological impact of people ( children in particular) being told nearly continuously that their lives are inadequate, they are inadequate, they're unappealing, and that their real value to society (and chance for a passible life) is measured solely by what they own and the products they use.
Ads aimed at children and teens especially seem to lean on that message.
In other words, the effects of long term psychological abuse.
Note that not all advertisement does that, but it seems that a good bit of it does.
The idea is not too far-fetched if you decide to model the consumer, or in my analogy the node of a network, as-if the node is a computer with the 5 parts,
.... and you are left with MEMORY & CPU.
.... and we are always flipping from one part of the duality to the other, and never fully reaching the other because along the way we find ourselves in the third state of the duality which makes it a trinity but it essentially at the higher level reveals itself as the duality ...
... but we are still left with the MEMORY.
... although we are using a black-box and perturbation method to model our MEMORY-center. In the larger picture the errors that are introduced by dropping the CPU-aspect, and the MEMORY-CPU aspect of the node embedded in a network, can overwhelm the hypothesis that are derived from the MEMORY modelling by black-box-perturbation, but that is all we really have to start with ....
.... meaning that no matter how small the probabilities of a certain behavior based on the studies of memories, there is a good chance that in the large network a group of exhibiting that behavior exists ...
... and no less a person than A.N. Whitehead said that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. " So, I guess the more advanced we get, the more we will be suseptible to the fMRI .....
....
input,
output,
storage,
MEMORY &
CPU
Ignore the input, ouput, and the storage which are primarily determined by the initial conditions of the node
In MEMORY the SYMBOLS remain the same while we flow thru the symbol-space, and in CPU the symbol-space remains the same while the SYMBOLS flow thru the it... This is the essential duality that is at the core of the nature of reality - of timelessness and temporality; of static and dynamic; of data and methods; of intuition and logic
In this duality it is hard to determine the logic or the CPU aspect of the node, and it is hard to model the the third state that is the meta-state MEMORY-CPU
It is this memory that we are now able to model using the fMRI
The key aspect now is that though we can only probabilistically model the node, or consumer, in the network, the probabilities tend towards deterministic as the networks get larger and larger
Anyway, the point that I wanted to develop was that in adition to having a certain number of people whose behavior can be predicted by MEMORY, there is a lot of us whose behavior deliberately tends towards this automatic bypassing of CPU, i.e. thinking
just a thought
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.
Note the bias here in the interpretation of the results. The eliciting of a stronger response in more primitive areas of the brain - which Pepsi reportedly does when neither is named - is viewed as the more objective reality. While a response which involves higher areas of the brain which are concerned with the aesthetics of it is just a matter of "brand." Further, there's the implication that when the higher areas of aesthetic appreciation are active we're being more manipulated by brand, and missing the reality, as defined by the most primitive reaction, which could well be based on Pepsi having a sweeter taste.
In all likelihood a splotch of bright red will have a stronger reaction from primitive brain areas than will a fine landscape painting (we're strongly programmed to respond to red since it's often a sign of blood and danger). By the logic of this researcher (at least as reported by the Times) our considered preference for the landscape painting over the splotch of bright red is a sort of manipulation by the brand "landscape painting," or perhaps the brandname of the painter. While there's some small degree of truth to this, isn't it largely back asswards?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I suspect you're right, though really we're only talking about a couple hundred thousand years of evolution. Homo species prior to Sapiens probably didn't have the kind of symbolic processing ability that would make such linguistic or visual appeals, or the the ability to resist them, evolutionarily important, even if they had language, which is also under question. And in any case, the combined Homo and Austro primate branches have only been around for about 5 (+/- 1) million years.
However, let's say that a technique that can be shown to influence peoples buying and desire patterns, with a mechanism that can be adequately understood outside of statistical correlation (such as a visual-linguistic technique that provokes desire for an object through creating a dopaminic/serotonal cascade in a portion of the brain) exists and is discovered.
In that case, I expect one of two things would occur:
These constraints might compel researchers in the field to avoid explaining, or even looking for an explanation of, how the effect actually works. Instead, they'll probably just identify certain correlations in focus groups between MRI results and patterns of desire and consumption (buying).
I wonder what would happen to such people. Would they be better paid than individuals in your typical focus group? After all, going through the MRI process would be far more intrusive, tedious, and time-consuming than sitting around a table answering questions.
What would happen to people who exposed themselves to such testing on a repeated basis? Would they become obsessives or fetishists, like the characters who went through SB-5 trials in William Gibson's "Idoru" and "All Tomorrow's Parties"? Given the amount of TV most people watch, would we accidentally create a society of such obsessives? Would MRI comparisons, between people who watch TV on a regular basis and people who don't, show that we've already created such a society?
Hmm, if nothing else, it could make for a good SF novel. But then, I suppose Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" has already covered some of this territory.
I, for one, welcome the arrival of our new advertising overlords.
The research described in the article is actually well-advanced--we're beginning to localize higher mental functions. Once the fundies notice this, their reaction should make their crusade against evolution look like small bananas. Why? Because this is one of the trains of experimental evidence that neuroscientists have used to demonstrate that the soul almost certainly does not exist in the religious sense. See http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augus tine/no-soul.html for a discussion.
Firstly, you can't have a "stronger" or "higher" or "larger" fMRI response - the most you can have is a larger probability that the signal you are reading in a particular region of the brain is not due to chance but to manipulation of your experimental variable (in this case, the drink being drunk). A comparison between two such probabalistic values (in the article, the degree of 'activation' in the ventral putamen) is pretty much meaningless. The experiment also doesn't control for the possibility that more people in the sample just prefer Coke (at least, from the information given in the article, this is the implication). One of my supervisors was approached a couple of years ago by a film distributor, who wanted to show fMRI pictures of someone just sitting, versus someone reading a book, versus someone watching a film - the desired effect being, of course, to show that films recruit more of the brain. Duh! It would have worked, and been a legitimate thing to do - but they wanted it in a matter of days (and with pretty pictures too!) - this stuff takes time, at least with our facilities it does. So, no deal. In terms of whether fMRI and similar techniques tell you anything ... hmm. Kinda. But results are consistently over-interpreted by many in the scientific community, and as has been pointed out in other posts, fMRI measures local blood flow, not neuronal activity (blood flow, by the way, can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as caffeine, which is a vasodilator ... so if either Coke or Pepsi contained more caffeine than the other, that could partially account, potentially, for differential fMRI results)
And don't even start me on using functional imaging techniques as "lie-detectors" ...
There's a long way to go, and anyone who says different really IS selling something.
Mod early, mod often.
Personally, all the money spent on advertising is wasted on me. Simply because of the obnoxious ads, either content or running the same lump'o'doodoo 2 or 3 times in a row, I will not buy that product. Whenever an ad comes up, I either change the channel or radio station. Take that Ad Exec and smoke it.
I wasn't very happy with the article. I can taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi, and I like Coke better, as do most people. Pepsi has a more sugary taste. People apparently don't want that in a strictly recreational drink. Beer is another example; it is bitter.
Thus far, I've seen a lot of posts saying that this doesn't work or that if it works then it's a terrible thing because it gives advertisers the ability to manipulate the subconscious mind to make you buy stuff you don't need. But, there's a greater question of ethics here. Why are these advertisers being given access to a scarce medical research resource (magnet time) when there are so many other things that could be done with that resource for the benefit of humankind? How can someone's priorities be so screwed up as to give questionable advertising research precedence over other clearly legitimate scientific pursuits?
Huh!? What are you saying?? I don't understand!
And where are the boobies!??
Mmmm... boobies!
ThinkGeek merchandise is the product in question, eh? Heheehe. Or Sony Playstations, or kewl trendy laptops, or... Well you get the idea.
Apparently if you annoy enough people badly enough, they don't buy your wares. Imagine that!
Mod the parent up. In this case, it is definitely the marketing companies that are the suckers. Let me first preface this by saying (in concordance with the parent) that fMRI is a very valuable research and diagnostic tool. It is limited, but when used in correctly designed experiments backed by sound interpretation, it can be very useful.
The biggest flaw with trying to use fMRI to tailor marketing is that seeing activity in a particular area of the brain that happens to be associated with function X DOES NOT mean that X is occuring when the person sees your product. Take, for instance, the example in the article where activation was seen in the fusiform area. While it is entirely true that that area is essential for the recognition of faces, this does not mean subjects were seeing faces in the cars. The fusiform area is involved in any kind of higher-order spatial organization, for instance grouping notes on a page, viewing disparate lines as a whole, etc. While it is appropriate to conclude that the subjects were integrating the many visual elements into larger perceptual wholes, it is not appropriate to assume that they saw the cars as faces, and certainly not to then conclude that they will then be more likely to buy the cars. If you want to test vehicle brand recognition, then you need to test that explicitly, not just in some simple presentation paradigm.
The following quote is completely misleading: "In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''"
First of all, fMRI is entirely reliant upon interpretation, so there are no "unbiased" "concrete facts". The activation is concrete, but trying to assign meaning to that activation is extremely tricky. Secondly, regarding secret lusts for Playboy, you may see activation in areas that typically indicate arousal, but that does not mean that the person actually likes it or will buy it. There are a million miles from the activity of non-concious processes of the brain and actual conscious behavior. If the "social image" centers light up with Coke and not Sprite (remember, image is nothing, thirst is everything (tm)) what does that show? I still might like Coke over Sprite! *sigh* Unfortunately, cognitive neuroscience is now being dragged through the mud of popular psychology.
At the time, noone realistically expected human-like computerized actors like those in The Matrix, or some of the TV commercials with Fred Astaire(sp?) dancing with a vacuum cleaner.
Then 30 years or so later, so much of this flick has come true it's rather amazing.
This (yes, on-topic) slashdoted technology is only one of the devices now real. Others include non-lethal weaponry that gets flashed in peoples eyes; the 3D scanning; etc.
The parent has completely misinterpreted Elizabeth Loftus' work, especially the stuff about the Disneyland experiment.
Please do not believe what was said above. If you really want to know about Loftus' experiments google for them.
Looks like the company discussed in that article never made it and changed business models.
Americans have a lower rate of savings because they have higher incomes. The money is always coming in, so savings take a less important role. Also, the inflation of the 1970s really stopped savings. It has nothing to do with some unique American over-consumerism.
There was also Brandon Lee in The Crow who did a little acting from beyond and that black girl (don't know her name) killed in an airplane crash they put in a vampire movie AFTER she was dead..
It's not uncommon at all. Even the dude in Terminator 3 was mostly CGI (the mercury metal guy)
And the gubmint does use "flash" weapons now. They have extremely bright strobe light guns that the aim in your face when they storm a house in a raid. They avoid the effects by wearing special goggles that counter-react to the strobe. Most welders already know about this device, it's an automatic welding lense.
At the very instant of making a spark it darkens the lense from sunglasses level to welding level in a split second. I have one, paid $200 for it when they first came out, now they are $30 at any welding supply house.
Whoever modded my original post down was ignorant. Probably not even born yet when that movie came out in 1981.
Watch the movie folks. It's exactly, 101% on topic. It's more on topic than you ever want to know...
You forgot: 1.5 See if anyone has got linux to run on the product yet.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
...welcome the new fMRI overlords!
Actually, it will be both funny and sad when/if this stuff is actually used. Funny since it won't work on me, marketing shit never has. Sometimes it's really funny how hard they try. Sad in seeing the number of dogs-drooling-at-Pavlov's-bell types wondering around, unaware of their plight...
Despite the fact that subliminal advertising has been proven not to work, some major corporations continue to pay big bucks to have it added to their ads. Despite the fact that 90%+ of fMRI research claims to find the place in the brain that lights up when X happens (rather than more properly claiming they're seeing the location of the brain process that supports such phenomena as X) the suits are going to continue to believe that neuroscientists can narrow down the brain parts that make you prefer one cola over another, and pay big bucks for that. "Just In Case It Works". It'd be a great time to be a neuroscientist if you didn't have a conscience. Unfortunately I am, and I do.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Yeah? Wow, I didn't catch that.
Whoever modded my original post down was ignorant
No, more than likely what happened is you didn't bash 'M$', so the moderator thought you were just trolling (as opposed to posting your ordinary and pointless 'M$ is teh sux' crap). Poor thing, probably got confused. Here's pair-a-whatever and nothing about 'M$' being evil??? Must be an impostor!
So never mind.
Here for $0 I'll tell you what consumers want:
1) free stuff
2) that is incredibly useful
3) that lasts forever
God produces such things , but you may produce
1) stuff for an affordable to cheap price
2) that is really useful, not a market bluf
3) that lasts more if comparatively expensive.
Now find me that $0 banknote
Yes, you are right. My choice of words was incorrect here and "implant" was definitely the wrong term.
The point of my post is not to revile Disney as evil and raise an alarm about "evil" corporations, but to suggest (what I naively think) an area where a lot of future research should be directed.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..