Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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