Award Winning Adverts Irrelevant and Incomprehensible?

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It may come as a surprise but this insight comes from Millward Brown in the recent article “Creative Effectiveness” (ADMAP,Nov, 2012).

In the article Millward Brown writes that ads which won IPA, Effie and Cannes Lions awards score highly on three of13 criteria that are part of a Millward Brown Link test:

  • Enjoyment
  • Involvement
  • Different to other adverts

The data presented by Millward Brown appears to support this, but one of the thirteen criteria that make up the Link test is mysteriously missing from the Effie results. Continue reading →

Gamification of Market Research

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In a The Emperor’s New Sneakers I noted that sampling bias and Subject Expectancy effect causes erroneous results in online panel research. There is another problem with traditional question-based market research, Rory Sutherland, the Chairman of Ogilvy, summed it up nicely in an interview June 2011:

“The conscious, rational brain isn’t the Oval Office. It isn’t there making executive decisions in our minds. It is actually the press office, issuing explanations for actions we’ve already taken.” Continue reading →

The Emperor’s New Sneakers

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EyeTrackShop claim to be able to eye track a home based panel of participants using standard low resolution webcams. It’s a big claim that could revolutionise market research.
We were interested to find out if EyeTrackShop really works so we replicated an EyeTrackShop study with two fundamental differences:

  • We used specialist eye tracking equipment costing over $20,000 each, as used by thousands of academics so we know the eye tracking results are accurate.
  • We recruited participants using an in-street intercept rather than a self-selected online panel. Continue reading →

Toby (or) Not Tobii

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November 2011 has been an interesting month for eye tracking user interfaces: Tobii announced the release of EyeAsteroid, the world’s first eye-controlled arcade game.

Eye Asteroids is a good PR vehicle Joakim Isaks of Tobii writes;

“EyeAsteroids is more of a novelty and designed to create a ‘wow, this actually works’ reaction when you try it for the first time.” Continue reading →

Discovery Has No Merit Unless It Can Be Explained To A Barmaid

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Ernest Rutherford won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 before becoming the first person to split the atom in 1917, he went on to discover and name the proton. The chemical element Rutherfordium (element 104) was named for him in 1997.

There is no doubt Rutherford was a smart man, he was also an outspoken one. My favourite quote by him is:

“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”

We want to apply the Rutherford test to neuro market research and invite companies in the field of EEG, FMRI and similar technologies to join us in an experiment at The Cherry Tree in Steventon near The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire UK.

Continue reading →

Is Market Research Precisely Wrong?

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There is a fundamental problem with most market research. David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’, recognised it:

 

“People don’t do what they say, don’t say what they think, and don’t think how they feel.”

Traditional methods of market research focus on what can be gleaned from the conscious mind largely because until recently the tools to investigate the subconscious mind were not readily available.

THiNK Eyetracking has recently completed a comparison study of an award wining national advertising campaign that clearly shows the difference in conscious and unconscious responses to advertising. Continue reading →