Read My Mind
My cover is blown. A commercial for the Boone County Fire Protection District flashes across the screen of a tv in the PRIME Lab’s testing room. The camera follows a fire hose up to a flaming garage door with intense, melodic music in the background. A message appears on screen: “What would you do without volunteers?” I would be in trouble, I think. Wires attached to my face and arms, I can’t move, but I have convinced myself that I like the commercial. “We learned a lot about you,” says Paul Bolls, laughing as he opens the metal door to the testing room. I try to explain myself but give up. Anything I say won’t matter because the creators of the commercial, from Woodruff Sweitzer, have just observed me subconsciously dislike their work. A feeling of minor disappointment and embarrassment sweeps over me when Bolls says, “You’re not the ideal target for the commercial.” But that is what the lab is for. the PRIME Lab, tucked away in the Missouri School of Journalism, was founded in 2004 by Glen Leshner, Paul Bolls and Kevin Wise. The goal of the lab is to track physical and psychological responses to advertising — psychophysiology, the science is called. “Brands struggle a lot with figuring out how to effectively execute emotion in their messaging,” says Bolls, the director of the lab. “I think we’ve all figured out that emotional connections with your audience are critical.”
The testing room is simple: a recliner with a tv in front of it. The only differences from a normal home are the wires streaming from the chair and the one-way black glass behind the recliner. The wires monitor heart rate and skin conductance to see how much attention is being paid to the commercial. Two other strands attached to my face test for facial electromyography, or facial EMG — whether i am smiling or frowning. The technology seems like it belongs in a futuristic, Orwellian-themed movie, but Wise says the data is just meant to enhance traditional market research in an age when customers are exposed to new media all day long. “Market research and advertising research has been around for a long time,” Wise says. “In my view, the basic premise of it hasn’t changed a whole lot. We’re still trying to get a sense of how people think, feel and act in response to persuasive messages. “What has changed, of course, are the ways people are exposed to advertising and the tools we have to study people’s responses,” Wise says.
Wise, Bolls and leshner have made a habit of tearing down assumptions that have been mainstays for advertisers. The black lung, tracheotomy, rotten teeth smorgasbord of pictures Congress had planned on posting on tobacco products “doesn’t work,” Bolls says. “Everything we’ve done shows that particularly with negative emotion, there’s this pretty small window of effectiveness when it comes to emotional intensity: how intense you get with that negative emotion,” Bolls says. “When you get too much negative emotional stuff in a message, it pushes people away rather than motivates them to think about the issue. Scaring people is not an effective way for people to truly think about making long-term health decisions.” Other research has been conducted as well. One major company wanted to better integrate emotion into its online platforms, while a major theme park company wanted to evaluate how a parent makes purchasing decisions based on his or her kid’s perceptions of the park. “They want to figure out how the way their kids emotionally respond to the experience influences parents’ attitudes and decisions,” Bolls says. “They want a handle on the parent/ child relationship.”
Because of confidentiality, I can’t write in the company names or even the results of the tests. But these corporations, nonetheless, sought out the PRIME Lab to answer their questions. Popularity is spreading. A survey conducted by the association for Psychological Science shows that 27 percent of empirical articles about psychology used psychophysiology methods in 2009, up from 13 percent in 2004. Similar labs have popped up at universities around the country. Texas Tech, Ohio State,Stanford, Tufts and Indiana, to name a few, all have similar setups. With spreading popularity — the labs are used to study anything from dementia to measuring responses to slow download speeds — the chief goal at MU is to train students to use the science in their own careers. “Any given semester, the number of student researchers in the lab hovers around 35, and that’s ranging from freshmen on different research fellowships to doctoral students working on their Ph.d. dissertations,”Wise says. “This is a university laboratory, so our primary mission is to conduct research and to train students.”
This is way too expensive
Because of cost, most laboratories are concentrated at universities, with the occasional large advertising firm collaborating with a school, Bolls says. “The biggest limiting factor to local and regional businesses to engage in this type of communications is obviously money,” he says. “It’s expensive for particularly a local and regional company.” That doesn’t mean Bolls doesn’t want to forge new partnerships. His dad owned a Napa Auto Parts store, so he has a soft spot for small business, he says. Bolls says companies make the mistake of investing so much money in new research that they overlook research that already exists. although the PRIME Lab has done a lot of work with positive and negative emotions, “there’s a body of knowledge that local businesses and ad agencies could tap into without having to spend a lot of money collecting data.” Moving forward, he hopes to be a sort of “message consultant.” And while technology advances, ethical concerns arise. When brands place a product at the end of the aisle or surround you with knick-knacks in the checkout line, the goal is to gain attention, to get you to spend more. Stores play slow music, which, studies show, encourage more browsing and buying, according to Business Insider. Doritos engineered a devilishly addictive flavor designed at enticing people to keep eating without feeling full, according to the New York Times.
“My position is that we are a long ways from the world described in 1984 or even in the Minority Report,” Bolls says. “But could we eventually get there? Yeah, we probably could. But I also think the benefits of this research still outweigh the risks. I think there is some benefit to brands figuring out how to com- municate with their audience in a more relevant and resonant manner.” Wise says there is nothing to fear. “It’s not an exact science; it’s not perfect,” he says. “One of the challenges of psychophysiology is that people sometimes see the sensors and say, ‘oh, you’ve got a window into someone’s soul, right?’ Well, we don’t. What we have is a toolbox for making inferences about very basic psychological processes based on the physiological responses that occur as people consume media.” The research will advance to complement traditional market research, but Bolls says it should never replace it. “there’s a very specific reason this research should not replace data obtained with traditional tools,” Bolls says. “And that is because really no profile of psychophysiological responding can index how much you trust a brand.”