Advertising Week panel reveals insight into the new science behind advertising
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Neuroscience and the Real Housewives may not seem like the most likely of matches. But Bravo's panel, "Get Inside Your Consumers' Minds," featuring advertising experts from research teams at Yahoo! and Universal McCann, unveiled fascinating insights into the science behind the hot field of neuromarketing. Here are the key facts that advertisers need to know about this emerging field, and how to optimize ads across both TV and digital.
Fact #1: Biometrics reveal what ads people like by going straight to the source: the brain
Using measures such as heart rate, skin conductance, respiration, kinesthetic differences and eye tracking, researchers can determine what types of ads or content people pay attention to and find the most engaging. Neuromarketing technology works by detecting what parts of the brain "light up" when people look at a stimulus. According to Pranav Yadav, CEO of Neuro-Insights U.S., different parts of the brain are responsible for different activities related to engagement and recall.
The left side of the brain activates as it processes details and complex information, while the right side is more engaged when a person has an emotional response or processes visuals. Researchers can even pinpoint when memory encoding is happening in certain parts of the brain. This would indicate that an ad has a stronger chance of being remembered.
The key benefit of this type of research is that it does away with self-reporting or social desirability biases. This type of research looks at people's undeniable unconscious reactions.
Why does this matter? Tony Marlow, Director of Strategic Insights at Yahoo!, says that 95% of the decisions we make are made at an unconscious level. o when people are asked how advertising affects them, they often genuinely don't know and can't access what's happening at the unconscious layer. Biometrics extracts insights that consumers often can't articulate.
Fact #2: Neuromarketing isn't an exact science, but neither is more traditional survey-based research
The panelists all agreed that while the technology behind this research has improved significantly in just a couple of years, it's far from an exact science. The Advertising Research Foundation's effort to create standards for this type of research will help significantly. But Graeme Hutton, Director of Consumer Insights at Universal McCann, acknowledged that neuro-based insights will still be open to interpretation, just like focus group results. In other words, biometrics research can tell you what ads someone has a strong emotional response to, but why that's the case can be trickier to isolate.
There are also sample size issues since neuro-based research is often significantly more expensive than survey-based approaches. Experts advise advertisers to try to keep the sample size as robust as they can afford and look at only a few variables, so that direct correlations are easier to make. That might mean showing the same ads to the same type of people, but just varying the context around the ads.
Yahoo!'s Power of Relevancy study did just that within a biometric laboratory environment. Each participant was presented with ads that were personally relevant, contextually relevant or both. Marlow says that attention to an ad increased by 27% when an ad was personally relevant, or behaviorally targeted, to users. Contextually relevant ads elicit an emotional response that's almost twice as high as those ads that aren't contextually targeted. He says the strongest response comes when an ad has both contextual and personal relevance.
Fact #3: The right media, the right message and the right timing all matter
Universal McCann's Hutton says that the saturation of media makes it more important than ever to target the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Twenty-five years ago, he says, ad tolerance was fairly high: Consumers could see an ad about 25 times before hitting the "wear out" point. As consumers have become more media-literate and more exposed to advertising, Hutton puts that number closer to four or five times today.
Dave Kaplan, Bravo's VP of Research, shared a nuanced anecdote about research the network has done around the interplay of context and creative. Bravo's content is focused on five areas: food, fashion, design, beauty and pop. Throughout the history of TV, food ads have been paired during food shows and performed well. Now with the help of neuromarketing, Kaplan is finding that, say, a stylized car ad that talks about aesthetics elicits more of an emotional response during a beauty or fashion show because there is a strong contextual fit. Based on this insight, the network is testing "outside" categories during some shows.
Panelists pointed to studies that show there is a large margin for waste in TV with incorrectly targeted ads, which leads to apathy in the audience. However, if you target incorrectly in online display advertising, it's even worse. Audience members not only tune out, they have a strong negative response to the brand, according to Marlow.
That's exactly why he says his research team at Yahoo! is investing heavily in giving advertisers and publishers the right insights. His work is meant to help create both ads and content strategies that are correctly targeted, avoiding that negative user reaction and instead triggering a strong emotional response.
Bottom line for advertisers
In the next decade, neuromarketing will undoubtedly grow in influence. It's one tool in a growing arsenal that can be used to better understand how creative and media work together. But ultimately, the goal of all advertising research should be to improve user experience. After all, people don't hate advertising. They hate bad advertising.
-- Dianne Molina
