14 DAY TRIAL // For many years, experts have argued that the brain is the final frontier in advertising. There are many types of ads in circulation today, and almost all angles of approach have been exhausted. Some companies have turned to placing video cameras on billboards. These machines see what people stop in front of the ads, and then display relevant content to each group. But now corporations are working hard on breaching the last barrier, that of the human brain. They want to know how people think, so that they can use this knowledge to sell more products, the BBC News reports.
The goal here is people's loyalty and, of course, their money. The largest ad companies in the world have access to large sums of money, which they use to invest in technology that allows them to understand how our brain functions when it comes to perceiving and interpreting the ads we see. A significant number of studies have been conducted by these corporations over the past few years, in which they outfitted participants with electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment. Their aim was to watch how the brain's electrical activity patterns changed in response to the ads the participants saw.
EEG has been around for the better part of the last 90 years. It is a non-invasive brain imaging method, which relies on fitting patients or test subjects with swimming suit-like helmets, outfitted with numerous sensors. These devices are capable of detecting the electrical impulses that the nerve cells underneath the skull fire to each other. Each of the sensors measures the electrical activity in its vicinity about 2,000 times per second. Recent advancements in this technology now allow for the data to be digitized directly into graphs, rather than appearing as marks on a sheet of moving paper.
“Computers now allow you to aggregate the results and sample more people. You can also calibrate responses according to previous results. You get different responses depending on whether you're looking at a large or a small screen; say a television or a mobile phone. And if you're walking around a supermarket you're going to get a different response from if you're looking at a static screen,” explains Neurofocus Europe director of lab operations, Darren Bridger.
Companies that want to gather a lot of data are better off using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a method that is a lot more precise and rigorous than EEG. “When it comes to specific neural marketing tools the clearest method and the one that has been researched the most in the scientific domain would be brain scanning with fMRI. A big concern is that one needs to assess the cost versus the benefit and the cost is naturally very high for use in these methods,” says University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience expert, professor Nilli Lavie.