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Google dives into subconscious marketing

October 24, 2008

Google believes that the effectiveness of the transparent InVideo advertisements that it has begun running on YouTube clips cannot be measured by traditional criteria like click-through rates. Instead, you have to get inside viewers' brains, literally, and monitor things like "emotional engagement" and "memory retention" and "subconscious brand resonance." Teaming up with the neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus and the branding consultancy MediaVest, Google conducted a study in which it measured people's nervous-system responses - through brain-scanning skull sensors, eye tracking, pupil dilation, and galvanic skin response - as they watched YouTube ads.

The study, which involved 40 participants, found that "InVideo ads scored above average on a scale of one to 10 for measures like 'attention' (8.5), 'emotional engagement' (7.3) and 'effectiveness' (6.6)," reports Mediaweek. "According to officials, a 6.6 score is considered strong." Explains Google's Leah Spalding: “Standard metrics don’t tell the whole story [about InVideo ads]. Google is an innovative company, and we want to embrace innovative technology ... These ads require an approach that is more technologically sensitive.”

In a presentation on the study yesterday, the researchers described how they included a test of "brainwave response to brand logos." It found that "subconscious brand resonance" strengthened considerably when InVideo overlays were added to traditional banner ads. "Even a single exposure to an InVideo ad boosts subconscious brand awareness from moderate to strong," they reported.

As the Google study indicates, market research is entering a brave new world. Armed with the tools of neuroscience, marketers are shifting from measuring people's conscious reactions, which are frustratingly unreliable, to measuring their subconscious responses. Of course, once you understand the determinants of those subconscious responses, you can begin to manipulate them. But marketers would never go that far, would they?

Posted by nick at October 24, 2008 10:22 AM

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Microsoft is experimenting in a similar way. The response to this invasion and mental colonization is for us to have, in turn, a skill in controlling our thoughts, as awareness of ourselves that is superior to the software skills used in tracing our preferences, psychographies and mental tendencies. We need to be like yogis. The yogic geek

Posted by: Ivo at October 24, 2008 12:35 PM

Back in February 2006 I attended the Brown Symposium, and they discussed this and similar testing. A neuroscientist named Read Montague spoke about marketers using this kind of research. Another speaker addressed how pervasive marketing has become, to the point that when a group of high school students refused to watch the daily ads at their school (they felt manipulated), they were suspended.

The trouble is that we don't train people early enough to think critically -- and by critically, I mean in a way other than the all-or-nothing, either-or herd behavior so many people display. If we can teach people that the world is not a series of simplistic dichotomies, we stand a better chance at resisting the deluge of marketing dumped on us.

Posted by: alexfiles at October 24, 2008 01:51 PM

Ah, so Google has instruments that measure "subconscious brand awareness"? How very interesting.

Posted by: erich at October 27, 2008 10:59 PM

Google dives into subconscious marketing

October 24, 2008

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