Dr. Michael Smith
Vice President
Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience
The bar has never been higher for brands trying to reach their consumers. It is an increasingly cluttered media landscape, with billions of dollars in advertising at stake. And technology has created an environment in which we’re never more than a click away from something new and exciting. While this creates potential for advertisers, it also creates pitfalls. But it certainly requires us to study consumers with methods that can pinpoint their behaviors. In particular, non-conscious, unbiased, neurobiological based responses.
Decades of academic research in cognitive neuroscience, as well as recent advances in the cognate fields of neuroaesthetics and neuroergonomics, can provide broad insights into the development of effective advertising creative. These fields have helped us to better understand, in principle, what types of information the brain can fluently process, what design elements might distract from a message or make it difficult to comprehend, what types of imagery might appeal and what things consumers might find aversive.
Insights from Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience deliver solutions that help marketers optimize the effectiveness of video advertising, digital advertising, packaging and in-store elements. For example, techniques for optimizing the layout of graphics and text in the design of compelling static images, to methods for increasing the empathy elicited by actors in video advertising, and to the use of neuroscience to balance tradeoffs between emotional engagement and effective branding in marketing communications. The insights and strategies shared in this session will provide immediate value both to client brands and to the broader creative community.
