Rewiring Storytelling: Neuroanalytic Brand Boosting From The Startup That Predicted The Trump Win
In 2016 American technologists SPARK Neuro went against the grain of popular (pollsters) opinion to accurately predict Trump’s shock win, thanks to its canny analysis of the brainwaves of undecided voters in swing states - observed when watching ads, clips and speeches from both candidates. Measuring attention levels, nervous system activity and emotional spikes the results revealed what its CEO, Spencer Gerrol, refers to as the powerful “subconscious pull of social desirability, of judgement avoidance” or in layman’s terms that what people say and what they do rarely match up, especially when in the shadow of a group - either physical or virtual . It also showed that we even lie to ourselves to some extent, trumping (no pun intended) our own usual rationale when it comes to the till/ballot box.
It’s a black hole of brand concern that SPARK Neuro, which was formally founded in 2017 but recently received $13.5M in funding from investors (including Actor Will Smith and Michael Eisner, former chairman and exec. of The Walt Disney DIS -0.75% company) has leapt on. Migrating its detective tech into brand land, its overhauling the largely duff results of traditional brainstorming exercises and marketing focus groups as well as revealing exactly where, to the very second, to alter a story arc or sequence of imagery to amplify impact (“helping to hit people, including shoppers, whose goal is not to pay attention”). Future possibilities offer the promise of mind-boggling, in-the-moment personalization and remote neuro interfacing.
As brand tools go, it’s never been more useful because while content is still king (27 million pieces are shared daily) and video in particular is booming (85% of people actually want to see more video content from brands in 2018) it’s a world of painfully misleading cues that brands are now banking on. For instance, SPARK Neuro’s assessment of the 2017 Super Bowl ads detected that the Mr. Clean ad depicting a flirty male cartoon character shimmying his way around his household chores came off predictably badly in focus groups with men (“a product of major machismo,” says Gerrol) but in reality, it was watched at least as much by men as by women, received one of the greater viewing rates on Youtube plus, and here’s the punchline, the men actually paid closer attention.