Ed's Letter - Apr08

I always say that with media measurement today, the closest you can get to understanding how people consume media - and how the things they see, hear touch or feel relates to their purchase decisions - is not close enough.

And the only way we can truly understand how each consumer thinks, is to get into their minds, think what they think, and see what they see, which, sounds to me like it is impossible even for the most advanced technology, although I never say never.

But there is technology available today that allows companies to track people's eye movements when walking through an airport terminal for example, and that technology is coupled with advanced analytics methods measuring how long people dwell on each ad and thus make intelligent inferences on how much of an impact the ads make on the person.

Championed by Access Testing in Australia, the research involves subjects wearing futuristic eye glasses which are linked to a portable device and which transmits video and sound to a laptop. More on the technology and results after the research was carried out at Changi Airport in the upcoming May edition of Marketing magazine.

While you may have heard of eye-tracking research before, I'll bet not many would have heard of neuro marketing research on people's physiological response to advertisements.

At this year's Clio Awards, as reported on Marketing Daily on 19 March, a subject will be exposed to the finalists' ads while wearing a cap with electrodes linked to electroencephalography (EEG) equipment. Brain activity will be measured and recorded in millisecond increments to determine which ads elicit the strongest response.

The research will be conducted by Sands Research and it will be the first time a live audience will witness first-hand the effects of advertising on a human brain.

I had the privilege of seeing for myself how a person wearing the cap with electrodes used nothing but his mind to write a sentence which appeared on a computer screen a while ago at a CNN Future Summit event, and while it took probably half an hour to write half a sentence, it still was a big deal.

As media measurement capabilities improve, I'm expecting to see the uptake of such ‘funky' technology rise as well, and give birth to a world where almost every marketing decision is a well-informed and well measured one but at the same time allowing space and budget for those gut-feeling, instinctive, throw-caution-into-the-wind-type idea which could just rock my world.

It's an exciting prospect indeed.

Debbie Cai

editor