Hasta La Creative!

And we are back.

As you might know, I’ve been busy for the past two weeks moving to a new place, hence no internet, hence the lack of updates. I’m all set now, and we are back to our usual schedule. I’d never have to deal with so much customer service before in such concentration, and I have to thank all these people for taking most of the pain out of the process.

Excellent Moving truly lives up to its name. They sent me a huge truck and two guys who were running up and down the stairs with the furniture that can be barely lifted by a normal human. They were perfectly on time and on budget even though I had severely underestimated the number of boxes my possessions would fit in. If you need to move around Boston, you can’t go wrong with them.

I wonder if agents sitting on the front row of desks at a real estate office usually get more walk-in business, and I’m glad one of them did because he found just the place (if you know Cambridge, you know how old and run-down many apartments here are; I’d seen seven of those). Call Apartment Rental Experts on Porter and ask for Paul.

Moving utilities has been a breeze using NStar’s website. Comcast continues to provide great service even though they had to send a second technician to fix something that had been overlooked by the first one. It took two business days from the initial call for the internets to resume their smooth flow.

And of course, many thanks to AdLab readers for sticking around and nudging me to get back online:

“The crowd demands entertainment!
Толпа требует развлечений!
Gloata cere distractie!
众人需要娱乐”

To kick off our summer season, here’s an article from MIT Tech review about websites that recognize the cognitive style of visitors by the way they click around and adapt their interfaces accordingly:

“The researchers’ initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site’s sales by about 20 percent. While quite a few sites, such as Amazon.com, offer personalized features, many of those sites adapt by drawing information from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires. The Sloan system, however, adapts to unknown users within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user’s pattern of clicks.

In addition to guessing at each user’s cognitive style by analyzing that person’s pattern of clicks, the system would track data over time to see which versions of the website work most effectively for which cognitive styles.”

67 Best Practices for On-Screen Communication
Press release (Apr.17, 2008): “NeuroFocus has distilled and compiled its findings into 67 key points, or “best practices”, designed to serve as a roadmap for ensuring that visual communications on a screen match what the brain desires to see the most, and what it responds to the best.”

Most Ads Are Not Neurologically Optimal
CEO of NeuroFocus in a follow-up interview with Media Post: “We’ve found that about 75% of all content–not just advertisements–is not neurologically optimal.”

“For example, consumers interpret info on different parts of a screen with different sections of their brain. […] So an advertiser or TV show producer has reduced the engagement potential and effectiveness of their content from the onset if the bulk of the textual and numerical info is placed on the left side–with the imagery or brand logos on the right.

“Take that simple principle and go see how many brands have gotten it wrong,” Pradeep said. “How many billboards have gotten it wrong? When you see a TV ad, look at how it ends and see how many have the logo placement wrong. Then look at something like Target’s in-store displays and see how many of them have gotten it right.”

Earlier:
Nielsen Invests in NeuroFocus

Image: Suck.com

Can’t believe I missed this great Brandweek piece about agencies bringing in hypnotists to focus groups; and it’s a practice with decades of history, too: “A former Grey exec, Solovay has been hosting such groups for a decade. Her clients include about dozen brands including blue-chip beer, soda and telecom companies as well as 20 different agencies.”

Has anyone tried administering thiopental sodium — the truth serum — on focus groups yet? Gotta be cheaper than running the groups (“Four sessions cost about the same as a typical round of focus groups ($50,000-75,000).”)

Salon.com, back in 1999: “It’s an intriguing thought — the fate of America’s consumer brands resting on the dubious musings of a bunch of soporific focus group respondents.”

Anyway, here’s everything you need to bring the magic to your office:

Brandvisioning, the company mentioned in the article. The pitch: “BrandVisioning Whole Mind Ideation brings focus groups to a whole new level. BrandVisioning focus groups use the power of hypnosis to allow consumers to better access and report their feelings about a product, a service, or a piece of communication. We uncover the core insights and truths that encourage deeper connections to your brand.”

Keith O’Neill, a hypnotherapist also mentioned in the article. From his website: “Hypnosis acts like a time machine. Through the process of “age regression”, hypnosis enables us to take respondents back to their earliest product and brand memories and the emotions connected to them.”

Hal Goldberg (above) is a former Leo planner who’s been doing hypno-groups for 35 years. Call 800-646-4041 for a free DVD of a hypnotized group in action. He’s in both the Salon’s and Brandweek’s articles.

There’s a blog full of marketing tips for hypnotherapy professionals (doesn’t the idea that hypnotists need marketing tips feel kind of funny?)

F0r the DIYers among you, I went through Amazon looking for a few books that wouldn’t be a waste of money. Judging by their reviews, these two seem to stand out as both professionally and accessibly written:

• Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors
• Conversational Hypnosis: A Manual of Indirect Suggestion

Check out this one on a different but related subject:

• Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game

Researchers at Yale established that “explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information.”

Here’s an automatic computer science paper generator and a postmodern essay generator, both very convincing, the former so much that it got its creators accepted at an academic conference.

— via Neuroscience Marketing

Pink Tentacle: “Researchers at Kansai University have developed a machine that can scientifically measure the quantity of a person’s laughter, as well as distinguish between the real and the fake.

The sensors, which attach to a person’s cheeks, chest and abdomen, take 3,000 measurements per second. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, where it is analyzed by special software that determines the nature of the laugh and assigns a numerical score based on the quantity.”

Would be fun to measure the quality of the canned laughter on TV shows.

To assess advertising effectiveness, NeuroFocus uses electroencephalography, a “measurement of electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp.” (wiki)

AdAge has published the results of a study that showed what SuperBowl ads caused the most brain activity (it’s Coke’s balloons ad and a Bud Light spot). The study was done by Sands Research.

In other mind-reading news today:

Press release: “The Nielsen Company today announced that it has made a strategic investment in NeuroFocus, an innovative firm that specializes in applying brainwave research to advertising, programming and messaging. The two companies will work together in an alliance to develop new forms of measurement and metrics based on the latest advances in neuroscience.

The Nielsen Company and NeuroFocus are joining forces to initially bring an array of new science-based products, services and metrics to clients in consumer packaged goods, television, film and emerging media. At the same time, Nielsen will integrate NeuroFocus’ techniques into existing services to better understand the elements of successful consumer engagement.

Consumers wear a specially designed baseball cap embedded with sensors that passively track brain responses about 2000 times a second as they interact with advertising or marketing materials. NeuroFocus can precisely and instantaneously determine what parts of the messages they pay attention to; how they emotionally engage with them; and what is actually moved to memory.”

If you want a sensor hat for yourself, you can get one here for about $12K.

During commercial breaks,

• 41.2% of viewers channel-surf
• 33.5% talk with others in the room or by phone
• 30.2% mentally tune out
• 5.5% regularly fully attend to commercials

In other news, this winter fewer people eat (68.8%) and more people do laundry (58%) while consuming media (70% and 57.4% in July 2007, respectively). This and other amusing tidbits in the new BIGresearch’s research of simultaneous media consumption SIMM 11.