Neuroscience Applications on the Assessments of TV Ads

Introduction

Advertising is the structured and composed impersonal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature, about products (goods, services and ideas) by identified sponsors through various media (Arens, 2006). Advertisements are generally presented through media channels such as magazines, newspapers, the Internet, radio, outdoor, and television. Although advertisements on television have lost their influence to some extent, it is undeniable that these types of advertisement still continue to have an impact on the general marketing strategies of companies. Marketing research is the planning, collection, and analysis of data relevant to marketing decision-making and the communication of the results of this analysis to management (McDaniel & Gates, 2013). Advertising as a discipline in social science also uses research methods familiar to social sciences. As such methods, either qualitative or quantitative, depend on statements, a subject may give misinformation intentionally or unintentionally related to various factors. In this context, marketing research professionals have demanded supplementary methods that preferably rely on objective tools such as neuroscientific measurement tools.

Therefore, applied neuroscience especially focuses on neurophysiological and biometric responses of the body as a complementary tool for advertising research. Neuromarketing research mainly aims to associate the activities within the neural system (brain and the whole body) with consumer behavior (Hubert, 2008). Even though data collection via neuroimaging seems closer to quantitative approaches, neuromarketing research, including biometric research, shows that it also possesses certain features in common with qualitative methods. In terms of advertising research and assessment, besides bearing a resemblance to quantitative and qualitative approaches in traditional methods, this application-based form of neuroscience is a relatively new approach that has gradually become prominent. Marketing research methods are traditionally based on several quantitative and qualitative methods by which the introspective and verbal outputs are confronted. Despite the fact that these methods are frequently used for sector-specific applications, there has been a trend towards the use of more objective methods, especially in the last decade (Ariely & Berns, 2010). The main motivation has arisen in relation to the need for accessing hidden information that could be described as unconscious information that is even not penetrable by the individual herself (McClure et al., 2004; Dijksterhuis 2004). The second motivation has been related to the possibility of providing cheaper and quicker settings for the assessments so that they could be automatized and serviced at a speed able to would satisfy the sector-specific demand (Ariely & Berns, 2010). These initial motivations resulted in the establishment of more than 300 companies by which different applications have been developed for sector-specific use within the application domain named as neuromarketing. This interdisciplinary field is at the intersection of various fields including marketing, economics, psychology, and neuroscience. There are many applications developed regarding the scientific findings in the academic literature.