The Future of Advertising May Lie at the Fingertips of a Bike Mechanic
If Steven Thomas doesn’t like an ad, the rest of us might never see it.
Thomas is not the chairman of some big ad agency. Nor is he a corporate marketing wizard. He mostly restores antique bicycles in Pasadena. But when Thomas isn’t fixing old bikes, he might be found seated with an oddball electronic device wrapped around two fingers that measures the opening and closing of his sweat glands. All the while, he is looking at ads.
Thomas is one of hundreds of paid volunteers whose physiological reactions to commercials are monitored by advertisers. Some researchers believe that what people say about advertisements is far less important than how their bodies react to them.
Do people sweat more while watching certain ads? Does brain wave activity increase? Or do their pupils widen while watching certain commercials? All of this can be monitored, and some advertisers use the results to help them select--and reject--the ads they eventually air.
But with the ad industry still in a tailspin and research budgets being chopped, among the first to feel the pinch are these unconventional ad research firms whose techniques seem to be the stuff of science fiction films. Although they represent just a fraction of the estimated $2-billion advertising research industry, these handful of research firms are under increasing pressure to prove that their methods work.
“The whole research industry is flat at the moment,” understated Mike Naples, president of the New York City-based Advertising Research Foundation. “With advertisers boiling down to just the essentials, those who aren’t in the mainstream may be suffering the most.”
No one ever accused Walt Wesley Co. of being in the mainstream. The 30-year-old research firm, tucked away in a residential neighborhood of Sierre Madre, is where Thomas goes from time to time to have the sweat glands in his fingers monitored while he looks at advertisements.
“If my lowly participation makes a difference,” Thomas said, “I think that’s great.” Two of his fingers are hooked up to a device called a psycho-galvanometer, which tracks when his pores open or close and works much like a lie detector. As the researchers explain it, when his pores are open wide, he is interested and taking in the message. When they are closed, he is bored and resisting the message.
On a recent Wednesday, Thomas was helping a group of Napa Valley wine makers figure out which wine labels are best at catching the consumer’s eye. Over a 10-minute period, he was shown 60 different wine labels by a research assistant. A researcher in a separate room charted his reactions.
The company behind this research says few methods are more reliable for gauging consumer reaction. “If you ask people how they feel about a commercial, they’ll tell you what you want to hear because they don’t want to offend you,” said Kenneth Kreh, president of Walt Wesley Co. Added Chairman Lucy Wesley, whose late husband founded the firm: “Sometimes people don’t really know how they feel about an ad.”
But critics say that this and other methods of physiological advertising research are just so much bunk. Among other things, they point out, with all of these tests it’s virtually impossible to know for certain if the reactions are actually positive or negative--or for that matter, exactly what people are reacting to.
“If it worked in the marketplace, everyone would use it,” said Gene Cameron, president of the Los Angeles office of BBDO Worldwide, which creates ads for Apple Computer. “The problem is, it doesn’t work.”
“Everybody is always looking for a more sophisticated reason not to make a judgment call,” said Dan Mountain, creative director at the Marina del Rey office of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulous, which creates ads for Infiniti. “A lot of times people would rather hide behind this stuff than deal with their own instincts.”
Ad agencies rarely like research firms because advertisers often turn to them to see if their ad agencies are doing a good job. Some people swear by the methods of these researchers. Among Walt Wesley’s clients is Johnson & Johnson. And even an award-winning ad for DuPont several years ago that featured a gutsy basketball player wearing artificial legs in a rough-and-tumble choose-up game was first screened by the research firm.
Several years ago, Allstate tested some of its TV commercials with Walt Wesley and found that the firm was very accurate in predicting which ads consumers would respond to. “The subconscious plays an important role in determining consumer behavior in the marketplace,” said Robert Hopkins, analyst in Allstate’s market research department in Menlo Park, Calif.
But in a cost-cutting move, Allstate has recently pulled way back on most forms of advertising research. And unconventional research firms were the first to go. “Like it or not, this is a time when convention means a lot,” Hopkins said.
Among the least conventional of ad research firms is one in Danbury, Conn., that measures brain wave activity while consumers look at ads. “What we have is not an easy sell,” conceded Curt Weinstein, president of Neurocommunication Research Laboratories.
Volunteers have two special sensors stuck to the backs of their scalps with a toothpaste-like substance. These recording electrodes track brain wave activity as consumers watch advertisements. Active brain waves generally indicate that the viewer is paying attention to the ad.
At one time the company even did research for the three major networks, which were trying to determine if their new shows would be hits or flops. But it no longer handles them.
“People say we’re weird. They say we’re in left field,” Weinstein said. “Well, we are. And we’re waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with us.”
Offbeat Ad Research
The more conventional forms of advertising copy research feature people looking at ads, then describing how they feel about them. But several forms of physiological-based ad research measure how much people sweat and blink and even their brain wave activity when they are exposed to ads. The recession has led to big cutbacks in physiological-based research, in addition to more conventional research. Examples of the most unusual things ad researchers monitor:
Sweat glands: A special device, hooked to two fingers, tracks the opening and closing of sweat glands while people are exposed to advertisements. When sweat glands are open, it’s a good sign.
Brain waves: Two sensors are attached to the back of the scalp with a toothpaste-like substance. They measure brain wave activity while people watch commercials. Active brain waves are usually a sign that people are responding to the ad.
Eye blinking: Special devices count increases and decreases in blinking activity while people view ads. Increased blinking usually--but not always--indicates that there is interest in the ad.
Pupil dilation: Instruments measure the size of pupils in the eyes of people watching ads. Wider pupils usually--but not always--indicate more attention to the ad.
