One of my favourite blogs is the Neuromarketing blog. It covers all sorts of new developments in the neurosciences as they apply to marketing.
A recent post on ‘Viral Video & Neuromarketing’ looks at a new study into whether it is possible to identify videos that are likely to ‘go viral’, to reach an audience of millions on services like YouTube. If you could identify the secret sauce for viral videos, then you could achieve the same results as through broadcast TV, but at a fraction of the cost. The results of the small scale study were interesting; the researchers could predict the popularity rankings of videos with 77% accuracy.
But the really interesting thing about the study was not the result, but the method it used. Neuromarketing studies are normally carried out in large, complex, expensive fMRI machines housed in university research facilities. But in this study, the researchers used a wearable garment with embedded biometrical sensors, allied with smart software to make sense of the data. If the study results are correct, this is a real breakthrough. It could enable much larger-scale neuromarketing studies, in much shorter times, at a fraction of the cost of fMRI studies. Very interesting indeed.
Neuromarketing is still in its infancy. But advances in its methods sometimes provide as much interest as the results of the neuromarketing studies themselves.
What do you think? Are advances in neuroscience useful for marketers? Or is this an example of marketers’ natural over-optimism?
Post a comment and get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
