Once you have my attention, you’ve got to do something with it. “When we break that data down, second by second, when an ad starts, the first thing is that you’ve got to capture my attention, say with a hot open just something that’s mysterious or unusual or odd. “You’ve got to build tension,” Zak explains. As my coauthor Shane Snow and I write in our just-released book, The Storytelling Edge, the past two decades of neuroscience research has shown that our brains are addicted to stories our synapses light up when we hear good stories, illuminating the city of our mind. There is a narrative arc we can follow: if we want to be happier and perhaps sexier, we should drink Diet Coke Twisted Mango.Ĭompelling story arcs are the key ingredient in ads that trigger high levels of immersion in our brain. Importantly, the story that the actress is telling features the product and is the reason she is dancing. Just before the peak at 22 seconds, she says, ‘Maybe slowing it down, maybe it’s getting sexier.’ The video is shot asymmetrically with the actress staying on the one side of the frame for most of the commercial, also an oddity that holds our attention. Viewers are intrigued and can’t look away. Then, the dancing gets faster and weirder. Her story about Diet Coke Twisted Mango continues as she starts to dance and talk about how great the product makes her feel.
If Zak’s claims pan out as the technology is more widely deployed–and if consumers don’t get spooked by the prospect of feeding their anonymized heart rate into a database for commercial purposes–it’s a potential game changer for the advertising world. And monitoring just 35 people provides statistically significant results.
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Better yet, he claims, anyone can learn to use the wearable and its accompanying software in just 30 minutes. This reaction is quantified through Immersion Neuroscience’s Immersion Quotient (InQ) algorithm that runs on a 0-10 scale and is able to predict purchase actions after brand experiences with a 75% to 95% accuracy, according to Zak. The wearable and its accompanying software, called the Immersion Neuroscience Platform, use heart rate to measure the production of oxytocin, the empathy drug associated with human connection. It’s launching a sensor that measures people’s immersion in video content and live experiences-from keynote speeches to shopping experiences-via a small wearable that straps onto the forearm. Paul Zak But after 12 years of research, Zak’s team at Immersion Neuroscience is hoping to change that. Even surveys and focus groups that ask consumers if they like an ad, or if it influenced their purchase decision, don’t reliably capture its true effect. Metrics like page views, impressions, views, and shares are very rough proxies for affinity. It’s easy to talk about, but much harder to quantify. Go to any advertising conference, and you’ll hear the word “engagement” bandied about more than any other buzzword. But what if they could foster it at a distance through video, and quantify the effect that different kinds of content had on human connection? The Engagement Paradox Until then, they’d been studying what happens when humans interact with each other.
Researchers on his team had been researching what promotes and inhibits the release of oxytocin, the empathy neurochemical in the brain known to foster human connection. “Well, yeah, psychologists use video all the time to change people’s moods.” When Zak returned to his lab the next day, he told a psychologist in his lab about his strange reaction.