Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
...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.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.
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 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
>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.