Our connection to content

Using neuroscience tools, Innerscope Research explores the connections between consumers and media.

It’s often said that humans are wired to connect: The neural wiring that helps us read the emotions and actions of other people may be a foundation for human empathy.

But for the past eight years, MIT Media Lab spinout Innerscope Research has been using neuroscience technologies that gauge subconscious emotions by monitoring brain and body activity to show just how powerfully we also connect to media and marketing communications.

“We are wired to connect, but that connection system is not very discriminating. So while we connect with each other in powerful ways, we also connect with characters on screens and in books, and, we found, we also connect with brands, products, and services,” says Innerscope’s chief science officer, Carl Marci, a social neuroscientist and former Media Lab researcher.

With this core philosophy, Innerscope — co-founded at MIT by Marci and Brian Levine MBA ’05 — aims to offer market research that’s more advanced than traditional methods, such as surveys and focus groups, to help content-makers shape authentic relationships with their target consumers.

“There’s so much out there, it’s hard to make something people will notice or connect to,” Levine says. “In a way, we aim to be the good matchmaker between content and people.”

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Marketers are using neuroscience to create advertising which speaks directly to your brain.

How do you decide which running shoes to buy? Why do you prefer the iPhone over all other smart phones? Why did smokers crave a cigarette after watching an ad designed to turn people off smoking, while non-smokers were disgusted by it? These are the questions advertisers, marketers and market researchers are constantly faced with and Swinburne Neuroscience Professor Richard Silberstein has some of the answers.

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