NeuroADjust

THE SCIENCE OF OUR ANALYSIS

 

To be more effective and competitive marketing today must incorporate the recent, revolutionary discoveries of neuroscience. Knowledge of the functioning of the human brain now enables us to communicate with greater clarity and specificity. NeuroADjust has incorporated this knowledge into an innovative ad analysis model to assess the impact and efficacy of your marketing messages. Our carefully formulated solutions provide you with concise and manageable changes to ensure that your ad flows with, rather than against, natural human information processing. We also help ensure that your message communicates what it is intended to, sparks interest and curiosity, and enhances brand recognition.

 

Our analyses are based on scientific knowledge about how the perceptual (subconscious) and cognitive (conscious) systems of the brain interact. Messages are constantly sent back and forth between these areas. Information is continuously shuttled between the low-level visual, auditory and emotional systems (early sensory cortex) and the high-level cognitive systems (late association cortex). The subconscious sensory systems are searching for safety and reward while keeping a suspicious eye out for anything potentially negative. When mere traces of suspicion are aroused, subconscious emotions reject the message at hand. We specialize in how to identify and address these disruptive elements. There are 4 fundamental insights that inform our approach:

 

 

1)      Early Perceptual Processing Is Paranoid, Selfish and Skeptical

 

Early in the stream of information processing, visual and auditory brain regions construct our perceptions before we are even aware. They operate rapidly under the level of conscious awareness. These early sensory areas are evolutionarily old, they generate imagery in biologically inflexible ways, and to a large extent, they have a mind of their own. Understanding how they behave, and how they interact with the more recently developed areas that underlie consciousness is instrumental in designing advertisements and creating marketing campaigns. These early sensory areas are paranoid and egotistical, and because they have abundant, close connections to the emotional and decision making systems, it is in any advertiser’s best interest to know how to keep from accidentally triggering them.

 

 

2)      Ad Content is Divided into Multiple Streams, Only a Few of Which Become Conscious

 

Early visual and auditory brain areas break the marketing message into multiple streams and expect the conscious mind to integrate these. The sheer number of different perceptual streams is too much for the association areas in the cerebral cortex to consciously take in all at once. Only a minority of these processing streams becomes conscious, yet each of the other streams can contribute to subconscious and emotional stances about the product or service. For this reason, it is important to be able to identify what these multiple streams will be and how they will combine to influence buying behavior.

 

Also, marketing messages must account for the fact that humans are limited capacity processors. If too many incongruous streams are introduced in an ad, most people will not be able to integrate them and will move on before they muster the effort to understand what the advertiser intended. We will help you straddle this divide, ensuring that your message is perfectly comprehensible to your target audience.

 

 

3)      Unattended Streams Can Still Make Isolated Impacts on Emotions and Behavior

 

Many of the perceptions that early sensory areas have regarding a marketing message are not reported directly to consciousness but end up making their impact via an indirect brain pathway. Negative messages in ads often only make it to consciousness via this indirect route. When this happens, the context of the negative message is removed, so the person may be completely unable to understand or report about what part of the ad was disagreeable to them. Even without this insight, they routinely trust their intuitive sense that there was a negative or off-putting message. Suspicious elements of a message that engender dissent, cynicism or incredulity may never make it directly to consciousness, but can influence a person to reject or ignore an ad before the message has been viewed in full. Likewise, endearing elements of a message that promote trust and authenticity may not become topics of active thought but often induce a person to make the phone call or to take out their wallet.

 

 

4)      Timing and the Temporal Structure of the Ad Message Affects How it will be Perceived

 

Knowing how conscious thinking progresses can inform marketing strategies and tactics. For instance, the frontal lobe and other cortical association areas, pick and choose elements from the early sensory areas to generate a stream of experience. New elements are constantly being added to the stream, old elements are constantly falling out and a select few elements remain. These elements remain because the neural representations of them stay active (the responsible neurons continue to fire in the brain). To make objective inferences about how an audience will perceive a series of messages, it is necessary to be able to make informed predictions about which elements will enter, which will fall out and which will remain active. This is incredibly helpful in the ad development process because it is necessary that the elements that remain coactive will cohere well together. Also this set of currently active elements will bias newly presented information in complex and dynamic ways.

 

 

SUMMARY

 

When you create an ad, you are developing a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The elements introduced during this narrative must be carefully positioned so that they can be consciously integrated and properly understood. You don’t want the brain’s natural processing routines to interfere with the sequence of messages that create the narrative. At Neuroscience of Advertising we help marketers build powerful ads by aligning with the brain’s processing routines and paying careful attention to how they construct the stream of experience.

 

Schedule a Power Point presentation with us and learn more about the science of our perceptual systems and how they influence buying decisions.

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VISUAL SALIENCE MAPPING

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We also offer visual ad scan technology which applies computational saliency modeling to simulate the brain’s visual system. Our software scans advertisements and overlays a heat map that identifies the features that the consumer will find themselves drawn to, such as novel combinations of: edges, contours, angles and color contrasts. The technology has been developed by university neuroscience laboratories, and has demonstrated an 80 to 90% accuracy rate. The saliency predictions, when interpreted correctly, offer important insight into the orientation and retargeting of ad elements. They offer us objective data as to how we can make your ad better, including: 1) repositioning important ad elements closer to the focus of attention, 2) arranging ad elements so that they cohere well and direct perception without changing creative strategy, and 3) orienting branding so that it can be found effortlessly, for the strongest possible impression.

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This is a low-cost, high-value service available at $500.00 per ad. We include 3 additional scans for subsequent ad revisions, and a saliency analysis report. The report details where the consumer’s eye will land first, and how the ad layout will guide and direct the consumer’s perceptual system. See samples of this on our "examples" page.

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