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Neuromarketers Pick the Brains of Consumers
Pickens points out a story at The Guardian about the development of neuromarketing, the method by which advertisers track signals inside the brain to roughly extrapolate how a consumer reacts to products and advertisements. We've discussed this technique in the past, but now consulting firms are appearing who have begun to use this research to increase the effectiveness of their marketing practices. The author also notes a paper which elaborates on the scientific details (PDF).
"At McLean Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric institution run by Harvard University, an advertising agency recently sponsored an experiment in which the brains of half-a-dozen young whiskey drinkers were scanned. The goal, according to a report in Business Week, was 'to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar'. The results were used to fine-tune an ad campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels."
but it probably should be.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is similar to a major plot device in Neal Stephenson's Interface (don't worry, no referral).
In the book the people backing the lead character's bid for the presidency have a virtual "focus group" of people across the nation that watch his speeches. They are able to make adjustments to the speeches in real time by monitoring the reactions of the focus group's vitals.
I, for one, think that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but quickly becoming creepier as well.
So, how will these marketing shrills handle the reactions when people start getting violently angry about these techniques?
Until a few months ago, I was working for a finance training institute. One of the courses was teaching neuromarketing techniques to bankers, specifically in the way it's used to 'sell' certain kind of less-than-stellar banking products *cough* subprime loans *cough*.
Seems to be working...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
and just employ hypnotists to force people to buy your crappy products god forbid that a product would be sold on its genuine merits advertising really is one of the nastiest traits of "capitalism" (if you can call it that at this point)
This seems like an expensive solution that could be solved by something cheaper. Something like... oh, I don't know... asking the guys what they think?
I'm all for interesting technology, but it still surprises me a bit that Jack would actually pay to create an ad campaign this way.
holes in that study and the Swiss Cheese would be minus the cheese.
"I thought I'd pick your brain 'cuz your nose was far too easy!"
More than to brainwash us to buy individual products, the main work that advertising performs is to condition our basic assumptions about how we as individuals relate to other individuals and objects. Almost all ads say similar things to us; things like that freedom can be reduced to that of the marketplace, that our individuality is defined by our consumption choices, that we are always, always lacking *something* in ourselves but that happiness and completeness are only a purchase away...
And no, I'm not trying to deny the influence our marketing-saturated world has had on *me*. I just resent it, and the marketeers who helped create such a system.
Isn't it rather bad scientific method to test (n) out on users of (n), then measuring effect rather than cause?
Or is this just a really good argument to dismiss marketing generally as pseudo-science?
...of a 'useful' product and just start being actual manipulation to buy shit-on-a-stick?
Here I guess.
Of course the thought of some trailer-tr@sh soaking up the latest food-o-matic-slicer-dicer-3001 suggests we're way past that point. However, if even educated people are enticed, then that might be the sign that it is more manipulation that advertising, and it shouldn't be allowed.
Actually I guess that even being edumacated hasn't been less-and-less protection in the past few decades...but I wouldn't bet on seeing US governing bodies making any changes to reduce that.
advertise
1. to announce or praise (a product, service, etc.) in some public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use it: to advertise a new brand of toothpaste.
manipulate
1. to manage or influence skillfully, esp. in an unfair manner, eg: to manipulate people's feelings.
Yes, marketers using technology to quite literally get inside your head is a very creepy prospect. But marketers have been using everything at their disposal to get into your head since forever. How is this different?
Personally I find the fact that there's a multi-trillion dollar industry working full time in an effort to manipulate my conscious and subconscious mind into believing that corporation X is my friend and that I desperately need they're crap in order to be a worthwhile individual already is creepy enough.
The fact that this industry's influence is so pervasive they can subject each of us to thousands of hours of their propaganda before we're even old enough to think makes that doubly so. There is good research showing that more 4 year olds now recognise the mcdonalds logo that most common animals or shapes.
I also particularly love this
to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar'. The results were used to fine-tune an ad campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels. Scientific research on how to better push drugs. Lovely. You'd think there were more serious problems for neuroscientists to be working on than how to get more people to destroy their brains with JD. I also love how this fact elicits absolutely no comment in the article, imagine the media reaction if the same technology was found being used to push marijuana.Any scientist working on this program should have their fingers taken off with bolt-cutters. This sort of predatory marketing is a crime against the human soul.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
20 years, Blipverts here we come.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Prof: Farnsworth: "The ads get into your dreams the same way this liquid gets into this egg." (sticks syringe into egg. Egg pops and splatters) "Except instead of liquid, it's gamma radiation!"
Wow. I thought that level of unleashed marketing was only good for cartoon humor.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
IQ has increased 3 points per year for quite a while now. If nothing else, these improved marketing methods will increase this "increase in knowledge" so to speak. This has been a game that we've played since the inception of man, ever improving manipulation methods to meet ones own ends.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
"The Tunnel Beneath the World" by Philip Jose Farmer
[Non descript Office worked walks up to a door marked "Marketing Dept" then opens it.]
Marketing Dept "BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS"
[Office worker quickly shuts door scratches head then opens it again]
Marketing Dept BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS WE WANT MORE BRAAAAAINS"
[Office worked shakes head and quickly heads down the hall.]
As if the self selection of losers with nothing better to do than get free junk when the rest of us are working hadn't already skewed how we were being pitched in favor of the lower part of the distribution that ensures the average IQ is 100, now ads will be dictated by those so dumb they are willing to let their minds be hooked up to machines.
When will the ad agencies realize they are marketing to the outliers at the low end of the intellectual, and therefore the socioeconomic, spectrum? Or will Adwords and Overture actually get ALL the ad budget before they figure out no-one with any money cares what they put on TV?
> roughly extrapolate how a consumer reacts to products and advertisements
If I killed the last door to door salesman by strangling him with his own entrails and forced him to watch his own slow death by supergluing his eyelids to his extracted fingernails sharpened and driven into his skull near his eyesockets, how would that be extrapolated?
But do you really need elaborate ad testing methods to sell alcohol? I was under the impression that it just had to not taste like ass while still keeping a reasonable price compared to the other non-ass-tasting brands.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
"The cycle for cyanoacrylate adhesives that started with test subject William Loman has reached its endpoint. A new applications with a different target market will have to be found to drive demand for this product, owing to the diminished size of its legacy userbase."
The neuromarketers dazzle the advertisers with high tech research tools and high-concept pseudoscience and charge a lot of money for the privlidge. Quite a scam.
What upsets me is that the waiting lists for MRI scans for legitiment medical uses can be weeks or even months long (in Canada at least), while these expensive machines, and the scarce qualified persons that operate them, are tied up for completely "frivilous", and likely totally useless purposes.
I find this sort of methodology quite disturbing when I imagine it used in political campaigns. In fact, I suspect it is already being used.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Most consumers aren't using their brains anyway.
Sad that something that (I believe) has a lot of potential with media and entertainment is pioneered to sell you shit.
This article, or possibly the book he reviews, makes some startling leaps of conclusion. What the researchers have done is to compare brain activity to mental activity; nothing new in this, just another step on the way to understanding. The advertising agency has used this to evaluate which kind of adverts seems to work best, on average, with people; nothing new in this either, but now they are trying to use another data source than before.
The article then jumps from these admittedly interesting results to start musing about 'what if "they" could read or even influence your mind as you walk into the shop' - which is of course utter nonsense. As things stand now you still require expensive machinery - you cannot 'scan' people's thought as they pass, and it is not likely that it will ever be possible to pick out individuals in a crowd anyway; and you cannot subject people to strong magnetic fields etc on a daily basis, it is simply too bad for their health. Put on top of that the fact that our actual thoughts are not something that can be easily interpreted from the electrical state of your brain - even if one could work out a precise rule book that would allow us to read the thoughts of one person, there is no guarantee that the same rules would work for somebody else. Each person has a unique brain, which is why they have different taste, reach different conclusions from the same facts and behave in different ways. What you can do is see some of the basic ingredients of our state of mind - how much anxiety, elation, sexual arousal, hunger etc - but one can't really tell what decisions a person will make, at least not in much detail. The complexity in doing this is as great as or even greater than predicting the weather.
So where does this leave things? The advertising agency now believes they can design better marketing campaigns because they have used 'scientific data'; but the fact is that all they can hope for is to strike a chord with an average of people. This doesn't really change a thing - it is not difficult to predict average behaviour, but it is next to impossible to predict what an individual will do. As far as I can see, this is just an advert: an advert for the agency.
Why don't you go outside, go for a swim, go get laid, go watch TV or teach your kids something,
Typo copy and pasting. Should read as follows:
Why don't you go outside, go for a swim, go get laid, or teach your kids something,
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
"inevitable side effect"
Your argument presents false dichotomy and is invalid. You assume that our only two choices are current capitalism with all the crap that comes with it, or some generic non-free state. How about a sane, regulated capitalism that works FOR the society and not just uses the society as a source of profit for the few? How about socialism with SOME elements of market economy and political freedom to avoid stagnation while keeping citizens happy and secure?
And no, socialism does not automatically mean totalitarianism.
In other words, the corporations are paying people to go looking for exploits in our brains. Full disclosure and all that, right? The problem is that once they've found the exploit, you can't just go and get a patch from the vendor. They're not full disclosure either; a better analogy would be those zero-day trading scenes where crackers sell exploits to the krasnaya mafiya.
Just why should this be legal?
(If you want to be picky about it, it's more like privilege escalation than rooting.. but I'm straining the analogy. And note that the market only works if we're "rational actors" - totally bug-free.)
Why is it that Slashdot's first reaction to these types of studies is "there should be a law!"? What ever happened to free speech? Seriously, if you don't like ads DON'T WATCH THEM! Stop demanding that the government outlaw everything you find uncomfortable or annoying or else don't complain when religious people try to regulate your life and control what you watch and say.
Creative Demolition
Is there really any way to prove they weren't?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Is George Romero making a new movie?
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Even if you buy the stuff you still have to tolerate ads saying you need it.
Now, "If I want to live, I need water" is true. But just "I need water" isn't.
Being pedantic aside, the problem with marketing is that it can (and does) blur the line between information and fraud. If you explicity stated, "Buy Alco brand Q-tips, and attractive women (or men) will sleep with you!", you would be committing fraud. (Well, if anyone actually believed you, and it wasn't obvious to a reasonable observer that you were being facetious.) By merely showing adds where a not-particularly attractive person uses one's product, and then suddenly has a more attractive mate, you've covered yourself legally, if not exactly morally.
That being said, with alcohol it might actually work. (Although in that case it's getting your target to use enough of the product that they think you're attractive enough, but that's enough debate entirely.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
"At McLean Hospital, a once prestigious psychiatric institution ..."
There, I fixed that for them.
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
Heya! Tom' is that you, buddy?
How've you been?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can.
Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers.
Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming.
You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.
sudo ergo sum
>If you want me to buy a product, make a good product.
/proven/ that all the thing you claim won't get you to buy a product _DO_ get people to buy products.
>Don't try to show me how people are having fun, having sex or having cake;
>I'm not interested in pretty little stories. I know you lie, or at least
>consciously break the Gricean maxims, hoping no-one would notice.
Here's the rub, though: Marketing research has virtually
It's easy to get up on the high horse on the Internet and say, "I'm too bright to fall for all that marketing crap.", but, as the article shows, there is a ton of research that goes into finding out what marketing _works_.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
What's good about advertising right now is that the entire industry is built on, and runs on, bullshit. This is good for advertising companies because they make a profit on an intangible end product with an unquantifiable value that they can charge as much as they want for. It's good for people who put advertising on their buildings and websites because even though the chances of reaching someone who would even consider buying the product being advertised are tiny, they make money for serving advertising. It's good (yes I said GOOD) for the general population because it is ineffective. If science were used to make it effective, the human race would be a bunch of drooling consumer-zombies unable to control their own wants, opinions and spending, much like the Nike Check-branded girl in an earlier post.
I'd much rather have big corporations throwing money at the perceived problem (some of which has positive effects for the average Joe) and annoying us with their stupid gimmicky propaganda (which CAN effect us, but we CAN train ourselves to ignore it and remain unaffected) than to have carefully shaped and targeted advertising which is highly effective controlling people's minds. Bring on the big stupid billboards.
Good products need little to no advertising. Examples: Supercars, and specialty sports cars from companies such as Lotus, Westfield and Dax; Handspring/Palm Treos in the early days (notice how they started advertising when things started to stagnate after the Treo 650), and specialty computer hardware and software most of us are familiar with. People will seek them out if they are wanted. Brute force advertising is almost an admission of failure.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't goatse (if I ever WERE to post malicious links they'd be the FBI's childporn honeypot link (that link is to the story, not the honeypot itself), so thank [PERSONALYDIETYCHOICE] I don't post malicious links, right?) but if I did, I would have been a bit more dramatic, like:
BEHOLD the emotional power of various images
just to highlight the emotional shock that image bombardment can really have on an individual.
You lie. You do not provide true information about a product, you provide lies designed to appeal to people subconscious and their baser needs. Does drinking one brand of beer over another give you more social acceptance? Really?
Your life's work is worse than a waste of time. You could be doing something useful, providing actual value, helping make people's lives better. But despite the lies you tell yourself, you are not.
You are engaged in mind control. You know full well that 'free will' is bullshit. Your techniques are scientifically proven to influence people whether they want to be influenced or not. The techniques you are taught are not designed to engage the logical, rational self interest of people, they are designed specifically to bypass those areas of the psyche and appeal to emotions.
And you create emotional needs, you deliberately try to make people feel bad about themselves and then sell them a false hope that won't actually make them feel good. Because if you did that, they may not continue to try to fill the emotional voids you've helped create with useless material things.
The profession of marketer is one of the worst, most useless and evil professions on the planet. You can lie to yourself about what you do if that helps you sleep at night, but your profession boils down to making people feel bad about themselves and then selling them false hopes. You are not increasing people's happiness, fulfillment, or self esteem.
You ascribe qualities to products that they don't have. Beer will not gain you social acceptance. A sports car will not make the barrista at Starbucks fall in love with you. One brand of dish soap does not really perform any better than any other.
And the products cost more because of you. We are literally paying for you to fuck with our heads. What you do is sick, the profession of marketing is a sickness on society, a cancer that we can't seem to cure.
How is 'pushing past another product's attempts to get you to purchase them' helping anyone fulfill a need? Wouldn't the other product have done so, too? If you were payed to say it would, wouldn't you? Do the actual qualities of a product matter at all to you? Have you ever turned down a job because you didn't like the product?
You claim below to be contributing academic insight to this discussion, where is that, exactly? You are so comfortable with lying and spinning the truth, you don't even know when you are doing it anymore, do you?
Finally, you have admitted to working in a profession that lies as a matter of course, why should anyone believe a single word that ever comes out of your mouth? You are a fundamentally dishonest person.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A penny for your thoughts?
I, for one, do wonder what Jack Daniels is supposed to have to do with Whiskey ...
> By watching how different neural circuits light
> up or go dark during the buying process, the
> researchers
can't possible determine whether the circuits involved are firing because they're working or because they're firing randomly in the absence of a function to perform, or whether the "lighting up" is excitatory or inhibitory. For that matter, without a simultaneous test of neural activity, all an fMRI can tell you is that blood is concentrating in these areas for reasons that may have nothing to do with neural functioning. I'm ashamed to say I've had fMRI work published , as have many other researchers, based on this "lighting up = working hard" idea, knowing full well all the time that there are fundamental errors in the assumptions. Sexy science that makes pretty pictures gets published, but does little to further understanding. In this case it inhibits understanding.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
147 comments and not a single mention of Lightspeed Briefs...
try to brick pignals out of my sain, they will prave hots of loblems.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Uh.. because there are a lot of different people on Slashdot. For every crazy or sane idea, there's someone on Slashdot who thinks that way. That person might post. You might as well have said, "Why is it that someone on the planet's first reaction is.."
...let me quote the Reverend Mother and yell, "GET OUT OF MY MIND"! These animals would never pass the Gom Jabbar.
Story: Genius works out advertising industry is stupid, rich and gullible; sells them a crock of their own shit; shouts "America, fuck yeah!"