Media: All About ... Neuromarketing

How do we know? Because Viacom Brand Solutions, led by the managing

director, Nick Bampton, took two dozen people along to the Maudsley
Hospital and made them watch telly while their heads were wedged into
MRI scanners.

Their brain glow was then measured and interpreted.

There's often a nutty professor aura to this sort of project (and the
notion that there are "areas of the brain commonly associated with
advertising effectiveness" is not designed to make you feel confident)
but it's already becoming a huge business in the US.

This is not entirely surprising given the relatively cheap access to MRI
scanner time. Because, since the advent of cinema more than a century
ago, all sorts of people have been fascinated by the potential of
audio-visual stimuli to change people's behaviour. And the theory has
always been that, once the workings of the mind are better understood,
you're halfway to the ultimate goal of some level of mind control.

And, of course, we are flirting here with advertising's twilight
zone.

In terms of popular mythology, the notion of brainwashing mind control
had its heyday during the darkest days of the Cold War.

The supposed threat of brainwashing as a political weapon was a theme of
headline writers throughout the Korean and Vietnam wars. It also
inspired one of the most curious books on advertising ever written -
Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957. This was Cold
War paranoia applied to Madison Avenue - and many readers unthinkingly
(ironically enough) swallowed its basic premise that brainwashing
techniques had been harnessed for commercial ends hook, line and
sinker.

And this notion is still with us. Neuromarketing, some pressure groups
say, could take the business of marketing and advertising into some very
disturbing areas indeed.

1. Most advertising effectiveness research has relied on interrogating
consumers to get an understanding about what they recall following
exposure to ads and what they consequently think and feel about brands.
It is therefore a supremely subjective and impressionistic science.

2. In contrast, more mechanistic real-time forms of analysis have
evolved from theories about which parts of the brain are responsible for
different functions - for instance, memory and emotion. Data is acquired
by plugging your consumer guinea pig into an MRI scanner and observing
which parts of the brain respond to different audio-visual stimuli.

3. Neuromarketing was developed at Harvard University in the late 90s by
the marketing professor Gerry Zaltman in a series of projects for
Fortune 500 corporations. He has now stopped using MRI scans and is
believed to be evolving an even more sophisticated model.

4. Leadership in this field is now claimed by BrightHouse
Neurostrategies, launched by Clint Kilts and Justine Meaux in 2001. It
works out of the Neuroscience Wing at Emory University Hospital in
Atlanta, Georgia.

5. Neuromarketing became a major US media phenomenon in 2003 when Read
Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas,
restaged the classic Pepsi Challenge scenario with respondents wired up.
His results proved (he argued) that conscious and subconscious responses
are often in conflict when consumers interact with brands.

6. There are now around 90 neuromarketing consultancies in the US and
major corporations regularly using their insights include Procter &
Gamble, GM, Coca- Cola and Motorola.

7. The leading UK exponent is the Oxford-based Neurosense, which
conducted the Viacom Brand Solutions study. It has undertaken projects
for many high-profile UK brands and, earlier this year, PHD hired it to
undertake some research. This sought to determine the relative impact of
different media on different parts of the brain. PHD now factors this
data into its planning.

8. BrightHouse plans to host the first worldwide conference on
neuromarketing in Atlanta in March 2006.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR ...

CONSUMERS

- Civil liberties groups believe that this is (or could lead to) the
ultimate invasion of privacy; and the more vociferous critics of
neuromarketing argue that if advertisers learn to tweak the collective
cerebral cortex, they'll soon have us all salivating like Pavlov's
dogs.

- Others, like America's Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, are
more relaxed. There are those who argue that this is nothing more than a
bit of harmless (if very expensive) fun. After all, the scientific
establishment remains highly sceptical about the claims of many
practitioners in this area. Some would go so far as to suggest that it
is no more credible than the 19th-century quack medical "science" of
phrenology.

ADVERTISERS

- The advertisers who are sold on neuromarketing techniques tend to be
rather uncomfortable talking about it - but a great many are now using
these techniques to gain insights into the way consumers interact with
brands at all levels, from media advertising to packaging and basic,
routine product use.

- But many advertising agencies continue to advise caution. Although
neuroscience has been evolving all sorts of colourful theories of how
the brain interprets sensory stimuli, they remain just that -
theories.

- Many agencies also point out that no-one has yet managed to measure
deep brain activity in an unobtrusive manner. The guinea pigs are always
conscious of the fact they are being monitored - which distorts their
responses.