Recent reports from Google expose the current state of internet advertising—56% of digital ads are not seen by humans, and only 50% of ads are viewable. Other reports have detailed bot fraud and URL masking, which no one anticipated ten years ago. Today’s 56% of digital ads not being seen isn’t any better than the 1880’s ad market when John Wanamaker lamented that 50% of every dollar spent on advertising is wasted.
New digital advertising platforms and programmatic software have done little to address the issue of ad waste, also known as ROI—or lack thereof. However, new research on Neuromarketing just published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience may lead to a whole new way of understanding and influencing consumer behaviors through the science of influence as a promotion variable. The breakthrough research was conducted by the Applied Neuromarketing Consortium, a group of interdisciplinary professors from Northwestern’s Medill and Kellogg Schools along with the Feinberg School of Medicine, in addition to doctors from Massachusetts General, Aston Business School UK and Drexel University.
Neuromarketing and brain scans have come of age and the new findings now offer scientific evidence about an integrated science of influence, which marketers can use to develop new marketing models that utilize influence based on how stimuli of the human mind relate to perception, memory and decision making. There is now considerable justification to use influence as a marketing, media and promotion variable. In other words—how the science of influence can replace old communication theory and get beyond a focus on what you did to how the market and consumers respond.
“There is now considerable justification to use influence as a marketing, media and promotion variable.”
I recently asked one of the authors of the study, Dr. Martin Block of the Medill School, how this new and ongoing work may impact marketers struggling to make sense of today’s new marketplace. Here are some of his comments:
Gary Drenik: How can Neuromarketing and the science of influence be used by marketers?
Dr. Martin Block: Marketing management has been plagued with two problems: having data that can relate controllable marketing (especially communication related) variables to real outcome variables (sales or other returns) and finding marketing variables that are consistent across variable options. For decades there was talk of single source data which would make it easy to relate variables to outcomes, but it never happened. The current availability of real consumer transaction data may have derailed the single source idea. Fusing transaction data, along with social data and syndicated data is being substituted for single source.
However, the various syndicated data have many different measures, different consumption or usage measures, and in some cases almost nothing beyond overall spending as is typically found in store activity. However, influence is a consistent measure across all marketing inputs and over the years Prosper Insights & Analytics has attempted to provide a consistent measure across the marketing inputs by way of its media influence to purchase data.
Drenik: What is the most important “take-away” from the research for a marketer?
Block: Influence allows a marketer to directly compare seemingly different categories, such as TV, coupons and shopper loyalty cards. The influence measure has to be accepted on face validity. The recent work in Neuroscience, along with a systematic definition of Neuromarketing, has led to the creation of the integrated science of influence. Influence of external stimuli on the human mind is now being systematically studied and related to other concepts such as perception, memory and decision making. There is now considerable justification to use influence as a marketing media and promotional variable.
Influence has utility as a marketing variable beyond the simple straight forward survey question.
Drenik: Thank you Martin.
In addition, the current issue (February 2015) of the American Marketing Association’s “Marketing News” features an article written by Dr. Don Schultz, professor (emeritus-in-service) of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern. In this article, Schultz highlights key areas which can create problems for marketers who focus more on distribution of messages than outcomes. He cautions that message distribution is not an endpoint for marketers, but what counts is the Influence they have on consumers and that organizational success is not so much what you did as how the market and consumers responded.
“…message distribution is not an endpoint for marketers, but what counts is the Influence they have on consumers…”
Marketers who would like to see how influence can be utilized to better improve their marketing performance as well as other predictive analytics on consumers, click here.
Disclosure: Prosper grants data access on consumer behavior and media influence to over 14 of the U.S.’s leading universities, including The Medill School of Intergrated Marketing at Northwestern.
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Gary Drenik is CEO of Prosper Insights & Analytics, a company that prides itself on turning data into evidence-based solutions for the C-Suite. www.ProsperDiscovery.com
