Tomorrow’s world today

Mind Lab’s Dr David Lewis, neuromarketing pioneer, on how it all began and where it’s going.

How did you come across the idea of combining experimental psychology with advertising?

In the 1980s I was lecturing in clinical psychology and psychopathology at Sussex University and I started using a very early form of EEG (electro encephalography) machine for measuring electrical activity in the brain. I needed some stimuli that had to fulfil certain criteria: they had to be short because the processing capacity of computers in those days was fairly limited and so I happened across the idea of using television commercials – not because I was particularly interested in advertising but because they were a very good 15-30 second stimuli designed by highly creative people. I wrote to agencies to ask for VHS copies of unaired commercials. The trade magazines became interested and in 1990 the BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World ran a feature on it. But I had no interest in the commercial sphere and focussed on the academic sphere until about 2004.

What can neuroscience tell us?

We like to think of ourselves as rational, conscious beings but most of our judgements are made below the level of consciousness. Even the most willing participant in the most expertly-run focus group doesn’t have access to that data. We look at measures of attention, emotion and comprehension. People can be paying attention but not be very engaged, and if they’re not engaged they’re less likely to act on it.

Neuromarketing is a term I don’t really like – it was coined in 2002 by Al Schmidt at Rotterdam business school. It suggests that we can throw out the methodologies and the science and stick some electrodes on someone’s head and know what they’re thinking – well that’s just not true.

You started off working with traditional TV spots – what about more recent advertising innovations?

Recently we’ve been exploring permission advertising. We worked with the people behind the TV show Come Dine With Me, and we wrote a programme which allowed people to click on items contestants were using, allowing them to find out more. We tested it out and found that when people had this control, it was way more powerful than traditional advertising, both in terms of immediate purchasing intent and subsequent recall.

These days people tend to fast-forward ads – but our work shows that even if you see a commercial at speed you can still pick up the message. It’s not a complete waste of money. Digital natives (young people who have grown up using computers) tend to be visually literate and able to understand visual information at a far faster rate. You’ll find that programmes designed for young people have shorter average shot lengths, with rapid cuts that can be almost subliminal. Older people find it very hard to process.