It's Not Brain Surgery

News item: A new research system measures consumers' reactions to advertising. Test subjects wear a baseball cap containing microsensors that track changes in brain response, eye movement and the subjects' skin 2,000 times a second as the consumers are exposed to marketing materials…

Lord love a scientist. Or a labful of them, as the case may be. They've finally overcome a concern that's plagued generations of researchers attempting to link brain activity and marketing. Specifically, the questionable effectiveness of measuring a subject's reaction to DM stimuli while said subject is strapped down tightly inside a $3 million ultra-mechanized tube.

That old methodology led to sample bias, as consumers with claustrophobic tendencies (or those not comfortable being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey) couldn't participate. In fact, the first brain-measurement devices, which resembled the bastard offspring of CAT-scan machines and VCRs, excelled at only one function: Determining how consumers reacted to advertising in similarly cramped spots, such as coach-class airplane seats and coffins.

Imagine a test subject, wired up and immobilized in one of these devices, being shown two Web page designs for, say, golf clubs. Now imagine that one of those designs resonates with the subject, and the resulting brain waves cause the scanner to light up like a Branch Davidian pinball machine.

“I want them! I'm going to buy them right now!” exclaims the subject in a muffled voice from inside his wired tube. “Where's my wallet?”

“Please stop wiggling, Mr. Johnson. You're disrupting the test results. And besides, there are no golf clubs.”

At which point, when the subject is denied the right to exercise his shopping prerogative, the electronic image of his brain shifts from its excited lightning pattern to a bruise-colored red, and all future readings from that subject display an overlay of pouting.

Sometimes readings are skewed by other factors. In one instance, scientists were baffled by the fear reaction a snack food ad generated. As it happened, they failed to note a piece of critical information — specifically, the test subject yelling, “Hey, I think there's a bee in here!”

Comes now the new system. Its significant innovations are(1) that the monitoring equipment has moved from an all-surrounding tube to a baseball cap, and (2) that brain responses are tracked at the rate of 2,000 impulses per second.

The first question one could ask is, “Why a baseball cap instead of a nice homburg?” The second might be, “If someone elects to wear the cap backward, will that screw up the left-brain/right-brain algorithms?” And finally someone may wonder, “If all they could afford is an old Montreal Expos cap, how well-funded is this research?”

Leave aside the sartorial concerns. For an industry still struggling to make the best use of clickstream data (to say nothing of recency, frequency and monetary calculations), any mechanism capable of capturing 2,000 impulses per second will likely capture a fair amount of irrelevant information. Especially when the majority of those brain responses consist of fantasies about the scientists administering the tests.

All this assumes the baseline data is valid — a dangerous assumption, as baseline data is culled from impoverished college students excited about a promised stipend. An undergraduate making $150 for an hour's work could be shown soft-drink logos superimposed over images of war atrocities and still give positive responses.

Finally, the new system still doesn't address the danger of physical factors skewing the results. Because when participants are compensated for their time, few will tell test administrators “Not tonight, I have a headache.”

W

For more of Richard H. Levey's Loose Cannon columns, visit http://directmag.com/opinions-columnists/loosecannon/index.html.