Advertisers turning to neuroscience

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U.S. advertisers spent nearly $500 per American last year. But what makes one ad persuasive and another a dud?Two Bay Area firms have adapted brain scanning technology to find out."We can't read your mind, I assure you," said A.K. Pradeep, chief executive of NeuroFocus. But his Berkeley, Calif. firm can do the next best thing -- scan your brain to map the electrochemical spikes, which are thought to signify attention, emotion and memory."This is the next generation in market research," said Hans Lee, chief technology officer for EmSense Corp. It's a San Francisco startup also using electro encephalograph, or EEG, technology to connect brain activity with physiological cues such as skin temperature or eye movement. The goal is to gauge how people react to ads, computer games -- even presidential candidates.EmSense and NeuroFocus are leaders in neuro-marketing, a field that aspires to create objective measures of the effectiveness of the $149 billion that U.S. firms spent last year on advertising to reach 300 million Americans, according to TNS Media Intelligence.University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist Robert Knight, a scientific adviser to NeuroFocus, said neuro-marketing has arisen at the confluence of three trends: a better understanding of the regions of the brain; precise sensors to measure when the memory center is active; and software to infer from these telltale signs whether a given message resonated with men or women of different ages."Neuroscience today is where physics was at the turn of the last century," Knight said. "We've had the groundbreaking thoughts and theories. Now we are measuring and testing."Science laid the foundation for neuro-marketing by studying conditions such as attention deficit disorder, which taught researchers how to recognize the electrical signals of alertness, and Alzheimer's disease, which required an understanding of how we form memories.Such studies have revealed which areas of the brain become active when we see a tiger leap across a screen or watch a baby smile.Both NeuroFocus and EmSense base their systems around devices that measure brain activity on the surface of the scalp. NeuroFocus uses a skull cap studded with electrodes. EmSense engineered its sensor into a headband that slips on and off easily. Both firms also track other physiological data -- eye motion, for instance -- to know what the person is watching.The firms pay test subjects to watch commercials. Subjects are wired with the appropriate sensors, which record their reactions. The technology can measure how men and women, for example, perceive scenes differently. Lee showed one television commercial that depicts a pregnant woman eating a dish of ice cream. Some drops on her belly, soiling her clothes. The ad goes on to show how machine washing with Tide lifts the stain. When women watched that scene, their brain scans indicated concern when the ice cream dropped and relief when the clothing emerged stain-free. Men showed little or no emotional response, suggesting the commercial didn't work for them.Skeptics say despite its scientific aura, neuro-marketing doesn't do much more than confirm what common sense would tell us anyway -- don't advertise detergent to men.EmSense has focused its brain scans on voters watching both the Democratic and Republican primary races to determine how they react to various candidates. NeuroFocus, however, will not use its brain scanning technology in politics."We are perfectly comfortable to help determine whether one kind of cereal advertisement is better than another, but we don't think it is reasonable or right to use tools like ours to help persuade you that one candidate is better for you than another," Pradeep said.But Elissa Moses, chief analytics officer for EmSense, said neuro-marketing gave better measures of gut-level responses than either focus groups or polls, both of which have long been staples of political contests."Do ethics shift when you have a sharper tool," she asked rhetorically, adding: "Political candidates are products, and political advertising is advertising."But the costs of neuro-marketing studies are likely to make the technique too expensive for routine political use. NeuroFocus charges $50,000 to $1 million for its analytics.(E-mail Tom Abate at tabate(at)sfchronicle.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)