Since the 1890s it has been known that changes in blood flow and blood oxygenation in the brain (collectively known as hemodynamics) are closely linked to neural activity.

As neurons do not have internal reserves for glucose and oxygen, more neuronal activity requires more glucose and oxygen to be delivered rapidly through the blood stream. Through a process called the hemodynamic response, blood releases glucose to neurons and astrocytes at a greater rate than in the area of inactive neurons. It results in a surplus of oxyhemoglobin in the veins of the area and distinguishable change of the local ratio of oxyhemoglobin to deoxyhemoglobin, the “marker” of BOLD for MRI.

Current fMRI research uses BOLD as the method for determining where activity occurs in the brain as the result of various experiences.

What can fMRI’s blood focus do? AdWeek recounts one example:

“This is data you cannot access with traditional tools,” says [fMRI researcher] Iacoboni. In classic focus groups and telephone survey research, he adds, “people can tell you things because of social pressure that they don’t really mean.”

One of Iacoboni’s favorite examples of this is the fMRI study he performed on Super Bowl ads. Exposed to ads that played on a female actress’ sex appeal, including one from GoDaddy.com, women who were tested dismissed it verbally as exploitative.

What was happening deep inside their brains, however, said otherwise. “Actually, they really enjoyed it,” Iacoboni says. The areas of the brain that encode reward lit up on the fMRI in the women studied; so did the areas indicating empathy—meaning despite what they said, these women saw the actress as someone they identified with and wanted to emulate.

Lovely stuff, isn’t it?  Knowledge that age-old subconscious vulnerability might still trump rational desires makes it possible for corporate capitalists to craft ways of perpetuating and tapping the old and explicitly disfavored vulnerabilities.  The latter just happen to be radically sexist, as well as aspirational, and therefore commercially profitable.  Hence, there is simply no question about what happens next.

And guess who is making this all possible? As usual, the public:

Illuminare is banking that its experts and proprietary analytical tools will help establish it at the forefront of the world of commercial neuroscience research. Illuminare, which hired its first CEO three months ago, and [its] founders and advisors include renowned neuroscientists and radiologists from UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine.

Dr. Marco Iacoboni, an Illuminare founder, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the UCLA Medical School,… runs the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the university’s Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. It was founded two decades ago as one of the first dedicated academic medical research institutes to use fMRI to study the brain. Research Iacoboni conducted in 2006 on viewer reactions to that year’s Super Bowl ads eventually led to a broader interest in finding commercial applications for their efforts.

While Iacoboni and the other UCLA researchers have used a variety of tools, including EEG, in their work, they see fMRI as the leading edge of neuroscience technologies. “EEG can tell you when something happens in the brain with millisecond temporal precision, but that information is generally useless when it comes to understanding what people think and feel,” Iacoboni says. “What people think and feel is dictated by where in the brain it happens, and EEG has no way of telling you that. The temporal precision of fMRI is good enough that I can tell you what you reacted to in a commercial.”

As Iacoboni notes, EEG only measures surface electrical activity—but that’s also its main advantage over fMRI since the equipment used to detect it (at least with current technologies) is much more portable. Multiple neuromarketers have developed simple caps containing electrodes that study subjects can wear while sitting at home in their dens watching TV, for example, instead of the artificial environment of an imaging center.

“EEG became more popular because it’s cheap,” Iacoboni adds. “But you also get cheap data with it.”

Iacoboni is careful to point out that even with the ability to peer below the surface using fMRIs, “brain regions do a multitude of things, not just one.” But some associations between stimuli and brain region, he says, are stronger than others, particularly when it comes to marketing messages—and the key with fMRI is that it can hone in on those regions much more specifically than an EEG can because of the 3-D view it provides.

Meanwhile, consider the great marketing advantage to it all: By getting us all to participate 24/7/365, the behavioral engineers gain not just an array of spy-cams that make Big Brother purple with envy, but written, quantifiable records the ever-expanding field of “consumer behavior.”

Hence, here is marketing consultant BlueKai Analytics bragging about how its “Intent Data outperforms other data sources by 200 to 300%”:

BlueKai Intent™ is the single, largest source of Intent data qualified by in‐market actions and keyword searches in the world. It is aggregated, real‐time data from top tier websites with unique access to purchase, shopping comparison, and product research behavior from their users. Intent behaviors extracted from these sites include: price search by make and model, destination city for travel or activity on loan calculators, product comparison, or specific keyword searches. Time and again this type of data is highly correlated to consumers who are ready to buy.

Unmatched scale of over 160M in‐market shoppers across 7 key verticals

Strict Intent data qualifications

Data transparency means exact targeting without guessing

Thousands of in‐market attributes provide unparalleled targeting granularity and specificity

Intent data providers include 80% of the top 20 sites in each vertical

In case you feel like making the gesture, here’s the link to BlueKai’s “opt-out” process. [Note: I think it's broken!]

Dig this latest report on how the professionals are busy analyzing how to manipulate the women whose personages make them the best vectors for conveying implanted corporate capitalist marketing messages to other women:

Marina Maher, which represents such brands as Procter & Gamble Co.’s Head & Shoulders and Cover Girl, Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Poise and Kotex and Jameson Irish Wiskey, used a survey of more than 2,000 women to identify a group of 12% of women who have outsize influence on the purchase decisions of others.

These “Influence-Hers” have considerably larger social networks — both online and offline — totaling on average about 170 people they interact with regularly, compared with75 for a typical woman, said Marina Maher Managing Director Keith Hughes.

Besides having a larger social circle, they also tend to be more actively engaged with brands. The Influence-Hers are 38% more likely than typical women to “like” brands on Facebook or to provide personal information to brands they like on Facebook. They’re also 105% more likely to post positive experiences and 125% more likely to post negative experiences about brands online.

Creating something of an amplified echo chamber, the Influence-Hers can have a big impact on making Facebook marketing more effective, Mr. Hughes said. Their comments and interactions with brand wall posts are both more frequent and seen by more people, which in turn positively affects brands’ ranking in the algorithm that determines how well posts do in the “Top News” rankings of wall posts.

Turns out that these “[i]nfluential women are themselves more likely than other women to have their purchases influenced by everything from online reviews to expert endorsements.”  Hurray!

Of the female influencers, 83% rely on expert reviews very or fairly often; 84% rely on consumer reviews to make purchase decisions; 42% say they’re relying more in the past few years on expert reviews; and 59% are relying more on the reviews of other consumers to make decisions.

They’re also as much as 90% more likely, depending on the category, to value the input of endorsers than other women. So the Influence-Hers both consume and generate far more buzz than other women.

Of course, no one human being packs the buzz impact of Oprah among the buzz generators, who are 76% more likely to read a book endorsed by her than are women generally.

The Influence-Hers are also 55% more likely than other women to go to a restaurant after seeing it on TV and 91% more likely to buy something for her home after seeing it on a morning TV show.

The implications of the research include a need for marketers to look beyond broad Q Scores and favorability ratings when doling out endorsement dollars, Mr. Hughes said (and, not surprisingly, Marina Maher has a proprietary index for that).

“Marketers need to be more targeted and strategic in the way they’re targeting these women,” he said. Among other things, he said brands need to give these highly influential women more opportunities to create and aggregate reviews either on Facebook or websites and to provide them with relevant information they can pass along — both branded and unbranded.

They used to talk about women’s liberation, didn’t they?

Axe ads have traditionally been about products that instantly turn women into lust-crazed vixens bent on coupling with Axe-wearing gents as quickly as possible. But in the first ad for the new fragrance Twist, a robot makes over the guy repeatedly during the course of a date in which the woman appears acutely interested only at the end. The ad is based on a concept co-created by consumers and ad agency Ponce (in late 2008, the agency was renamed Ponce Buenos Aires after Fernando Vega Olmos left to work on Unilever at JWT).

“Women get bored easily,” notes a version of the ad for Axe sibling Lynx in the U.K., which touts a “fragrance that changes.”

The reality, said David Cousino, global director of consumer and marketing insights at Unilever, is that all fragrances change, starting with a fresh, strong, usually citrusy top note that lasts for as long as an hour and aims to help cover the smell of alcohol-based propellants as they evaporate, progressing to a generally richer, milder mid-note and a longer-lasting and often subtler-still “dry-down” note. This is all old hat to fragrance developers and marketers, he said, but it was new and fascinating to the consumers in the development group.

“The guys linked that to the mating game and how guys are feeling that they need to constantly change and evolve to keep the girls interested,” Mr. Cousino said.

“Women get bored easily”?  Really?  In the 21st century, big businesses are still getting away with this?

And people wonder about the cultural impact of corporate marketing?

Ad Age describes the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-love, anti-real-family nature of the ad:

The organization’s ad will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, sharing a personal story centered on the theme of “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life,” according to a news release from Focus on the Family.

Not only do I look forward to hating whatever NFL team gets stuck with the odious peckerwood Tebow, but I commend this ad to those interested in the competing analyses of which side of the spectrum is shut out of the corporate media, and which is not, despite its fact-free, flak-providing bleats about “the liberal media” (meaning “the leftist media”).

Ad Age, of course, relays the preposterous claim that FOTF’s “Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an ‘anti’ stance against any issue.”

Sure.  And all the other ads, for each of which which CBS collects between $5,000,000 and $5,600,000 per minute (one wonders: WWJDWFMD?), are merely there to provide information, not mind-injections, to citizens.

This particular one here is Sam Gosling, the newest member of the team at Mindset Media.  Mindset is a new arm of the renowned commercial spy agency, The Nielsen Company.  Nielsen, of course, has a long history of helping corporate sales engineers use demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data to create “lucrative customer relationships.”

Among Professor Gosling’s publicly-sponsored research endeavors is work in “animal personality.”

As I explained in The Consumer Trap book, big business marketers not only view their targets as means to an end (as “consumers” of their firms’ wares), but as so many Pavlovian beasts.

To corporate planners, we product users are much more manipulable and profitable when we are in the cognitive modes we share with frogs, dogs, chickens, and other sub-human species.

The great fear of big business marketers is that we might become humanly (and perhaps even humanely) conscious of the links between our life-environments,  our natural proclivities, and our behaviors.  We might see their hand on the lever, in other words.  Hence, much of big business marketing comprises an effort to keep us down amongst the squirrels and fishes and lemmings in our triune brains.

So, along comes Dr. Gosling.  What can he add to the ever-expanding art and science of for-profit behavior engineering?

Animal models are useful because they permit experimental studies of personality that would not be possible in humans. The first stage of our research program is to appraise the viability of assessing personality in non-human animals. The second stage is to develop appropriate assessment methods. The third stage is to implement the findings of Stages 1 and 2 to address questions in personality, social, and health psychology.

Golly, he forgot to mention commercial questions, didn’t he?

On the face of it, this kind of research sounds oh so amusing, and maybe even liberating.  But, really, despite the kudos from the major purveyors of pseudo-sociology, what democratic or life-enhancing purpose could this stuff possibly serve?  Who would ever care about gaining super-precise understandings of how humans share psychological reactions with the less-conscious animals?  The one obvious answer is:  our overclass of market-totalitarian behavioral dictators.

So, is our ebullient, supposedly life- and animal-loving scientist troubled by this (often unmentioned) implication?

Hardly:

‘Personality science has a big role to play in ad targeting, and Mindset Media is at the forefront of the field, forging links between science and practical applications in real-world marketing contexts’ said Gosling. ‘Their approach is truly unique, and I believe it will soon have a big impact on how companies identify their audiences precisely and reach them efficiently.’

I don’t know about you, but the animal in me says “Grrrrr!” to that.

The truth, of course, is that what Honda is really testing is how effectively they can convert people’s petty vanity and sheer programmability into still more irrational brand loyalty.

Have people been falling into this trap?

The results thus far have blown away Mr. Peyton, who felt at the campaign’s onset that “If we got a million connections, that would be cool.” He called the push “a pretty powerful piece of advertising because people are buying into it and we aren’t giving anything away.”

Honda initially supported the site with a sprinkling of ads on Facebook. “It wasn’t a big media buy, but it got a lot of attention,” said Tom Peyton, senior manager-national advertising. Earlier this month, TV was added to the mix, with 15- and 30-second spots featuring actual owners. The commercials were created by Honda’s longtime agency, independent RPA, Santa Monica, which developed the concept. The buy, also handled by RPA, encompasses prime-time programming such as “30 Rock,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “Dancing With the Stars” and NFL football.

The campaign got a huge boost after a one-day targeted homepage takeover Oct. 19 on high-reach sites, including ESPN.com, CNN.com and SportsYahoo.com. That more than doubled the number of Facebook fans into the range of 1.7 million. (As of press time Oct. 22, the number had topped 2 million).

Footnote: As of this morning, the number of victims of this campaign is approaching 2.5 million.

Something milder than that has happened in Britain, according to Advertising Age. There, the Advertising Standards Authority (an unthinkable institutional possibility here in the USA, of course) has told Coke it can’t run its normal ads for Vitamin Water, due to their blatant, exploitative falsity (which, of course, is the same thing as the brand’s very purpose and plan).

The news there, though, is more about the shameless, laughable lies Coke presented in its losing attempt at self-defense. As reported by Ad Age:

One poster was headlined “More muscles than brussels.” The complaints challenged the implication that the drink’s health benefits made it equivalent to eating brussels sprouts — a popular U.K. winter vegetable. Coca-Cola claimed that the phrase was instead a reference to former action-movie star Jean Claude Van Damme, who is commonly labeled the “Muscles from Brussels,” referring to his origins in the Belgian city.

Another ad claimed, “Keep perky when you’re feeling murky.” It jokingly advised consumers that if you drink Glaceau Vitaminwater you won’t have to waste your sick days on real illness, and can use them instead “to just, erm, not go in.” Coca-Cola insisted that the “perky” claim was about mood rather than health, and that it did not imply that the drink could prevent illness.

The ASA also received complaints that the ads promoted the range of drinks as healthy, when in fact they contain high levels of sugar. Coca-Cola’s defense was that the products are clearly labeled, and that 7.5 grams of sugar in 100 milliliters is not a “high sugar” content. However, the ASA upheld the complaints because the sugar contained in one Glaceau Vitaminwater represents 26% of an adult’s recommended daily sugar allowance.

It would make an excellent project to study the course of other corporate defenses to ASA charges. These speak volumes about the depth of dishonesty and contempt at the very heart of big business marketing.

Some smart Germans have launched this website, which heartily deserves imitation here in the epicenter of market totalitarianism and cartooned reality.  [Auf Deutsch hier.]

Anybody got any starter photos?  We could do some of this right here at TCT…

Viewing of video on television, Internet and mobile devices — the Three Screens — continues to increase and has hit record levels.  Nielsen’s fourth quarter A2/M2 Three Screen Report reports that the average American watches more than 151 hours of TV per month, an all-time high.  They are also watching several hours of video on other devices: those who watch it on the Internet consume another 3 hours of online video per month, and those who use mobile video watch nearly 4 hours per month on mobile phones and other devices.

This un-discussed deepening addiction, a cardinal aim, requirement, and symptom of core-country corporate capitalism/market totalitarianism, also explains why most Obama voters haven’t begun to realize how massively and completely baited-and-switched they’ve been.