From Geoff Sheldon, VP, Brand Planning Director

Addressing the age-old paradox that what consumers say in market research and what they do in reality are often two different things, Neuromarketing is a new market research methodology where consumers simply can’t hide their true feelings.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity, and sensors attached to the skin to monitor changes in one’s physiological state, Neuromarketing allows us to truly get an understanding of exactly what consumers react to (in either a positive or negative way) when they see or experience marketing materials and messages.

Exploring this new frontier of market research, Buy•ology (a recently released book by Martin Lindstrom), details the results of Lindstrom’s personal Neuromarketing study where over 2000 volunteers were connected to brain scanning equipment and exposed to ads, logos, commercials, brands and products in the name of marketing and science.

Buy•ology is a fascinating read with Lindstrom providing interesting dialogue about consumer reactions to well-known brands and their associated advertising and marketing techniques.

Of particular relevance to agencies and marketers is Chapter 9 (Neuromarketing and predicting the future), where Lindstrom explores the future success of television programs. Two hundred volunteers were shown 3 TV programs and asked to fill out a traditional survey on how they felt about the program while their brains were scanned. When the results were compared, the paper survey results were disparate from the brain scans. Consumers claimed not to like a particular show on paper, yet the brain scan showed they were completely engaged and motivated by the show. Perhaps most telling was that, ultimately, the brain scans painted a picture that was completely in line with the reality of how those shows actually fared in the market.

Imagine applying this methodology to your next round of concept testing and predicting with certainty that the campaign will be a success. As Buy•ology highlights, with Neuromarketing, this is now possible.

For more information about Neuromarketing, and vendors currently using these techniques, please feel free to contact me at gsheldon@palio.com or 518-226-4140.

From Dan Bobear, EVP, Managing Director of Client Service

It all seems quite simple: Get the agencies in to do a pitch, make a selection, negotiate a contract and hourly rate, develop a scope of work, and you’re off to the races, right? As anyone who has been through this process knows it is much more complicated than that.

The negotiation of a successful contract requires experience, patience, and flexibility. Having been involved on both sides of this process for many years, it is clear to me that there is often a complete misunderstanding between the client and advertising agency as to what a quality relationship should be and what the real “product” is.

A common view is that an advertising agency produces creative work, selling materials, and other tangible work products. While these “nuts and bolts” activities are an important part of what an agency offers, they are very basic services that can be delivered by any quality agency.

The real product of an advertising agency should be quality thinking that leads to the creation of market-moving ideas. This is where the biggest disconnect often occurs between the client and advertising agency. In many cases, the pressure for short-term financial performance creates an atmosphere where “deliverables” trump thinking. The focus is often on creating a lot of attractive selling materials for the next sales meeting, and little time is put into what is really valuable: quality thinking. It is innovative ideas that drive a brand’s success in the marketplace, not how much “stuff” is created

The challenge is to create an environment where thinking and idea generation is valued more than the generation of tactics. This all starts with the negotiation of the contract and compensation model. Compensation models vary widely but generally fall into a continuum that ranges from a fixed-fee “project” basis to a full retainer. Under a fixed-fee project, a set price is negotiated around a list of deliverables that will be created during a set time period. The approach is very simple and works quite well when the scope of services and/or budget is very limited. Under these types of arrangements, it is generally difficult to “dedicate” a large number of agency staff to work on a single brand, as the scope of services and time frame are limited.

Every approach has its pros and cons, and there really is no “right” approach. What is important is that the compensation model incentivizes the creation of great ideas over the creation of “stuff.” If the compensation model encourages quality thinking and the formation of a strategic partnership, then it is a good model. Anything less isn’t doing the brand justice. If, instead of focusing on the perfect process or model, you can focus on a few guiding principles, you are much more likely to get to a good place.

In a nutshell: Make it fair, make it about the people, make time to think, and focus more on efficiency and less on the number of hours billed. To create an effective compensation model, it’s necessary to realize that the real agency “product” is ideas. The ideal compensation model will incentivize the creation of an environment that encourages quality thinking and the creation of market-moving ideas. While there are multiple pathways to get there, if marketers can help create this type of environment through their financial structuring, they’ll reap benefits for their brand for many years to come.

From Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative

What’s your brand’s personality? It’s an easy-enough question to answer – just take a look at your agency’s creative brief or positioning statement, where it might state, “Brand Personality: caring, empathetic, comforting.” Or maybe it’s “confident, assertive, capable.” Or, perhaps it’s “experienced, trusted, wise.”  Whatever it is, it’s in writing and official…  and it sounds just about right based on your product’s attributes. “OK, now let’s move on to the more important elements of the brief, like the Key Thought,” you might suggest.

Hold on. If you really want to ensure that your brand has a personality, a character that will truly engage your target, let’s look a little closer.  You always want your brand to communicate with your consumer in as compelling a way as possible, in a way that might actually suggest your brand understands what it is to be human, and is something – no, someone – who your consumer would like to get to know better, someone who has a little simpatico with your consumer.

So how do you ensure that? First, recognize how important an element your brand’s personality is. If you break up a communication into “what is being said” (the content) and “how it’s being said” (the attitude), you could say the personality of your brand makes up 50% of its expression. Your brand’s personality is the driver behind how your brand speaks, so make sure you’re putting it to work appropriately to get the right message across. As an example, the words “That’s great” can mean two completely different thoughts depending on how they’re uttered – with enthusiasm or sarcasm. In the same way, it’s important to make sure your brand communications are fully leveraging the “how it’s being said” component and that they’re doing it in a way that reinforces your brand’s attitude or personality appropriately.

Second, think about giving your brand some real personality. Human experience makes for some very interesting characters and moods in general. People are three dimensional, not cardboard cut-outs. As such, your brand shouldn’t be flat. Give it some depth of character. Don’t let it be just a throwaway… a shallow personification of your product’s attributes. Just because your product works the fastest doesn’t mean your brand’s personality should be expeditious or to-the-point. Your brand is bigger than your product. Know your competitive space and your target mindset and use that knowledge to create a brand personality that will stand out and appeal to an emotional need in your audience. By rendering a deeper personality with your creative you’ll be sure to draw your audience in deeper as well.

Take the Cheetos “Orange Underground” campaign that features Chester the cheetah. It gives the Cheetos brand real personality. It might not be the kind of personality you admire, but it definitely brings a human dimension to Cheetos beyond its functional attribute, i.e. satisfying flavor. This campaign was developed because consumer research showed that it’s not just kids who eat Cheetos. In fact, 60 percent of all Cheetos consumption is by adults. Robert Riccardi, managing partner at Goodby Silverstein (the ad agency behind the new campaign), says that Chester’s mischievous new personality stems from the idea that “powering down” Cheetos as an adult “feels like a nonconformist moment. You’re supposed to be eating arugula dip, but you have a nonconforming desire.”

So, through Chester’s somewhat mysteriously dark personality, the Cheetos brand is brought to a deeply human place. Chester may only exist in our subconscious, but he does represent an inner urge that many of us express outwardly from time to time: the desire to shatter adult norms. And with that the Cheetos brand bonds with its audience at a deeper level. Here’s one of the spots.

In pharmaceutical advertising, as well, there are great examples of how bringing personality into communications can deepen the impact of a brand’s message. One that most everyone is familiar with is the “Your dreams miss you” campaign for Rozerem.

In this campaign, the Rozerem brand connects at a deeper level with its audience as it uses the quirky visual and verbal language of dreams to remind us how important they are. Sleep specialists will tell you it’s critical for humans to dream… they serve as a processor that helps us make sense of our everyday reality. But rather than asserting this through a less-engaging approach that might establish sleep’s medical importance (and therefore Rozerem’s value), this entertaining campaign lets the viewer enter a dream, as if it were a reunion of sorts, for just a few moments. It says Rozerem has a sense of humor and imagination and sentimentality that all combines to create a deeper understanding of, and care for, the viewer.

The last thing any of us wants to do is abandon our friends, and by establishing an affection between ourselves and the characters we dream through the technique of developed personalities, we welcome the Rozerem brand into our hearts and minds. Take a look.

Remember, truly persuasive, brand-building advertising compels its audience to bond with your brand at a human level. And not until your brand “feels” human will it be able to get that human commitment from your audience. To do that, don’t overlook the power of personality for your brand.

Images © Uta and Thilo von Debschitz

From Philip Reynolds, VP, ACD, Copy

I loved reading this blog entry by Steven Heller on the work of the German scientist Fritz Kahn, who developed a copyrighted system in the 1920s for depicting the mechanistic workings of the human body. Anyone working in pharma advertising would have a flash of recognition: the Machine Man seems to always come up again and again in our creative reviews:

“Okay in this one, we’re looking inside the body of a patient suffering from Schmeckler’s disease. But surprisingly enough, where his kidneys are supposed to be, there’s a riding mower on one side and a Waldorf salad on the other…”

Machine Man appears in many variations: we’ve seen endogenous appearances of pinball machines, buildings (houses, factories, museums), construction zones, car engines, furnaces, electrical wiring, plumbing, and roads/highway systems, especially cloverleafs. Who knew there was so much going on under the skin, or even sometimes within it.

Do not confuse Machine Man with his cousin Robot, which is not a man but a fully automatized facsimile. The robot is used by science fiction writers, going back at least to Mary Shelly, often to comment on the dehumanizing effects of technology. Nor should the Machine Man be confused with its cousin the Fantastic Voyage. In that one, an illustrator depicts what is literally happening in the body at a microscopic level. Fantastic Voyage is good for conveying information, but unless Raquel Welch makes an appearance, a Fantastic Voyage concept usually needs a good line for emotive power.

I’d love to know who was the first to sketch up Machine Man. Though Leonardo da Vinci obsessively drew both human anatomy and fantastic machines, he wasn’t interested in combining the two. But surely someone was doing this before Fritz Kahn in the 1920s. I would expect that Machine Man developed in tandem with the Machine Age, bursting forth from sometime in the 1700s.

Will Machine Man ever die? The only way he will ever go out of style is if our technology becomes as complex and incomprehensible as our physiology. I still don’t understand how television works, so it would be tricky for me to use it as a metaphor for the human brain, say. I recently tried to use a simpler device, a pipe organ, to say something about the GI tract, but that concept failed in part because pipe organs just aren’t part of most people’s live these days. Which may be just as well.

From Kim Werther, Art Buyer

A recent Ad Age article titled “User-Created Ads Create Rights Conundrum” highlights an incident whereby Toyota used photographer Michael Calanan’s work without his permission. It’s really not shocking that many small companies have used images from photographers without their permission, but that big companies, such as Toyota, are doing it, is. Toyota should have known to ask for rights.

It’s dangerous for Art Directors, and agencies in general, to pull imagery off Web sites such as Flickr for many reasons. For example, one of the most common uses of Web-provided photography is for developing comps for a client presentation. You may present your ad as a comp, but what if the client loves the artwork so much they want to use that image right then and there? If the image is pulled from a stock house there will be no problem getting the rights; but with many of the Web sites that aggregate photos or artwork, it’s a different story. You cannot assume that you can use those images for advertising.

As stated in the article, you can possibly use the image for commercial use but there might not be a model release.  It is coming to a point where the internet is becoming the go-to source for everything; timing is tight on projects and people sometimes do not go through the proper channels for acquiring reproduction rights on images. I had someone recently tell me that Google provided free images for commercial use. But it gets tricky sometimes to tell exactly which ways you can use images provided on many Web sites. After taking a look at the fine print you often find out you can’t use an image for the purpose you might want.

Stock houses are your best bet to ensure that you’re protected when using someone else’s imagery. When all is said and done, any Art Director that is creating advertising with photography or illustration should always take the step to meet with the Art Buyer to make sure all rights are cleared for the intended use of the image. It’s your best bet!