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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.
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.
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.