As one might expect, interest in neuromarketing isn’t limited to the northern hemisphere. An article in The Age describes how what appear to be EEG caps are being used in Australia to assess reactions to ads and television programming:
Its techniques, developed by Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, promise to uncover viewing pleasures we may not care to admit.
Who knew for instance that Nine’s daggy reality show Farmer Wants A Wife would engage young men, scoring 0.83 on a scale of 0 to 1, more than young women, who scored 0.6? The lowest ever engagement was 0.43, for a Seinfeld repeat.
Neuromarketing can also tell you which songs pull at the emotional strings: testing confirmed Climb Every Mountain was a great choice in some National Australia Bank ads, although the testing was done before recent interest rate rises hardened our aspirational hearts.
The techniques can also warn advertisers that their messages come in the wrong order. Test audiences for a frozen seafood commercial were engaged by a freeze frame of actor John Waters walking along the beach with seagulls flapping about, but the message placed immediately after that high – that the product used “fresh fish” – got lost in the moment. Some judicious editing ensued. [From The Age – Advertising that can really get in your head by Steve Dow.]
The firm conducting the research described in the article is Neuro-Insight.
