FMRI technology helping advertisers choose most effective platform

Toronto communications firm PHD Canada is using new “neuromarketing” tools to help advertisers explore the different marketing values of TV, radio and other media. In its technology and media predictions report for 2012, released last week, international consulting firm Deloitte said functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) technology is expected pick up this year, helping advertisers and marketers develop more compelling video. Like a medical MRI, an FMRI can measure brain activity and how it correlates with emotions and specific types of thinking while focus group participants watch videos or test products. Brain activity imaging allows marketers and product developers to tweak their products for effectiveness. PHD Canada, a media and communications agency in Toronto, has been using FMRI data for the past few years. Fred Forster, president of PHD Canada, said in an interview that PHD has “pioneered” FMRI neuroscience in the exploration of how different media such as television or radio affect different parts of the brain. “What we found is that different media are much better at stimulating different parts of the brain,” he said, “and those different parts of the brain are responsible for different types of memory, or different types of ways in which consumers respond.” He said FMRI is becoming a valuable tool for companies looking to establish effective ad campaigns but emphasized that it is only one part of a greater advertising whole. Forster said if an advertising campaign seeks to change the public’s perception of a brand, for example, the advertiser would want to use the media channel best at stimulating the part of the brain responsible for long-term memory. Through years of FMRI testing, Forster said PHD developed a “neuroplanning” tool to determine what media channels best suit a client’s campaign. The neuroplanning tool is used once the communication task, or focus, of a campaign is determined, he said. “If we decide that the campaign’s task is, for instance, to disrupt current thinking about a brand, then what we would want to do is use our neuroplanning tool to find out what the best media are to do that,” he said. Forster added that neuroplanning is part of a broader tool set. “It’s not just about the FMRI results,” he said. “It’s how people are feeling about the brand now. There are a number of different inputs that go into it.” As with any tool, Forster said that, to be useful, users must understand what is FMRI and the campaign objective. From his experience, he said, the new technology is difficult to explain to clients. “Some clients love it and have embraced it, but other ones don’t think it’s right for them and are sometimes dismissive of it,” he said. Duncan Stewart, director of research for technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada, said in an interview that although FMRI is used with other neuromarketing tools such as electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate monitoring and eye-gaze tracking, his firm believes it is being used a “great deal” more than in the past. “If we had to speculate, it is more than doubling,” Stewart said. “It may be even tripling or quadrupling, but off of a small base.” Stewart said FMRI tools are being used in some of the largest and most important ad campaigns and that everything from movies and television shows to various consumer products are being modified as a result of FMRI data. Deloitte's annual report said FMRI research is considered “more reliable” than focus group testing, where individuals are not always honest. Stewart added that FMRI is expensive, with companies hiring scientists to conduct research and gather necessary data. “It’s not so much that these guys have FMRI machines in their basements,” he said. He said, for now, there is an industry stigma associated with FMRI market research because some perceive it to be linked to so-called “brainwashing” or “mind reading.” But he noted that FMRI is just another way of analyzing the human brain and isn’t different than other forms of traditional market research. “But because it’s peering-into-the-human-brain kind of stuff, it seems to set off some flags that other forms of market research don’t,” he said. Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy wrote in an email that FMRI can benefit businesses of all types because it opens up “entirely new avenues of insight into behavioral triggers and responses.” The technology allows companies to “fine tune” their offerings by knowing precisely how people are responding to messages and other stimuli, he wrote. “In business sectors where ‘the more you know’ is key to competitiveness and survival,” Levy wrote, “FMRI could be a tool of the future toward opening up a veritable treasure chest of knowledge and insight.” He said that although FMRI has promise, it will remain an “edge-of-the-spectrum” option for most businesses due to cost, complexity and maturity issues. Levy wrote that, for now, the same limitations that affect MRI in hospitals, such as high cost, infrastructure as well as logistic requirements, will transfer onto enterprises. Forster said the way PHD uses neuroplanning has little to do with how much a client spends on their campaign. “It has more to do with what has the right channels of communications based on what the communications task is,” he said. “It’s using that tool to guide thinking.” Bryan Segal, a Toronto sales executive at ComScore Inc., said in an interview that although FMRI is the newest trend in market research, similar systems have been in use for a number of years. Segal told The Wire Report that the company’s ComScore ARS system, which measures the strength of an ad campaign, has been around for more than 40 years. He said the system is based on analyzing the creative side of an ad campaign and involves tests to determine what “touch points” in an ad affect the brain in terms of search and reaction. Segal said different metrics such as colour in an ad can affect the brainwaves of the consumer. He said attempting to measure the creative strength of an ad campaign is not a new phenomenon. “I think that some of the data points and metrics are changing as technology improves,” Segal said. “But at the end of the day, being able to understand consumer behaviour, consumer thoughts and develop better advertisement through that input—it’s not a new theory.” Paula Gignac, president of IAB Canada, wrote by email Wednesday that advertisers and agencies should not make broad marketing and advertising conclusions based on results obtained from repurposed biological technologies such as FMRI. “Just because you can cause an area of the brain associated with pleasure to light up in response to your campaign, doesn’t mean consumers will buy your product,” she said. Gignac said many of the decisions humans make are based on fear centres in the brain that dictate the decision-making process. She wrote that the most successful advertisers “will be those who do the hard traditional research work to gain deeper insights into their consumers’ needs and wants.” dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

FMRI technology helping advertisers choose most effective platform

Broadcast | January 26, 2012

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