Can Neuroscience Help Improve TV Promotion? - Yuliya Torosjan - MediaBizBlogger

I arrived at Simulmedia from the world of medical research Before I started analyzing settop box data to understand how people watch television and audiencesamp8217 responses to promotion I modeled the flows of cerebral fluids to better understand how people responded to antipsychotic treatmentsI knew that I would tap into my statistical expertise at Simulmedia but I didnamp8217t anticipate that neuroscience would also prove applicableWhile our analyses rely on settop box data we are willing to search outside the realm of TV even into an area like neuroscience to inform our understanding of the interaction between an audience and the viewing content consumed It turns out that both settop box data and brain scans can give us information about viewersamp8217 engagement with a television program or promotionWe are not going to join the ranks of neuromarketers any time soon Collecting EEG signals and brain scan measurements every time someone watches TV is prohibitively expensive However we might be able to use the relevant ideas to come up with measurable markers of attentiveness or viewing modality We can then use these concepts in our analysis of the settop box datasetsA panel of experts on the brain and cinema gathered last month at the New York Academy of Sciences to draw an interdisciplinary connection between film and neuroscience The conference raised two questionsamp8212can we use movies as a tool to learn something about the brain and can we learn something about films from neuroscience The researchers presented some of their findings from the studies in which participants watch a movie while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI brain scanDifferent cinematic devices activate different structures in the brain For example a closeup shot of an actoramp8217s face tends to activate a part of our brain called the Fusiform Face Area FFA A long aerial shot lights up our Parahippocampal Place Area PPA Shots of an action being performed engage the mirror neurons in our brainsamp8217 Postcentral SulcusIf the same brain structure is activated at the same time in many people who collectively watch the same movie or program we can attribute the activation to the movie response The researchers use intersubject correlation ISC as a measure of similarity of response time among the viewers The greater intersubject correlation across the entire brain can be thought of as corresponding to the greater amp8220brain controlamp8221 that the filmmaker has on the audienceIn this context we may compare different directing styles and cinematic devices Alfred Hitchcock commands a much greater control of the audienceamp8217s brain activity as evidenced by the greater intersubject correlation than Andrei Tarkovsky whose style is much more open to interpretationFilm genres may be arranged on a continuum of their ability to elicit a uniform pattern of brain activity in the viewersamp8212snippets of real life shot on film documentary art films Hollywood and Propaganda films as the extreme case This idea might be used in Simulmediaamp8217s ongoing efforts in genre classificationWe hypothesize that the programs containing more cinematic devices that are designed to guide the vieweramp8217s perception most didactically eg montage continuity editing closeup and thus trigger more intense watching and anticipation will also have lower tuneaway during the promotions and a potentially higher promotion response rate The same principle applies to the structure of promotion itselfThe Entertainment Tonight clip below provides a good example of a structured promotion one in which viewers are clearly and unambiguously instructed what to expect in the coming showamp160On the other hand the enclosed NipTuck promotion is more openended and would trigger a less uniform pattern of brain activity across viewers Such response is also less predictable from the point of view of ratings We will continue working on teasing out more implications for our analysis

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Can Neuroscience Help Improve TV Promotion? - Yuliya Torosjan - MediaBizBlogger

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