Restricting product placement in this way is the kind of nanny-statism that’s completely defensible, and also preserves one of the most acute pleasures in British drama – watching someone go into the Queen Vic/Rover’s Return and ask for a pint of non-specifically branded lager. At least now they won’t be able to add: “And a packet of KP’s delicious new chilli-roasted nuts”. But how much further might the government end up modifying these rules? Will you be able to show someone eating a non-branded burger? Or perhaps only allow the most depraved villain to eat them, thus putting you off? What about showing real-life plastic surgery clinics, strip clubs, or any other area of potential moral ambiguity? If something that even a small portion of the British public find offensive is seen to be making financial gain during “our” shows, then the Ofcom switchboard should probably batten down the hatches.

But as well as the pact dooming broadcasters to a case-by-case assessment on what’s appropriate, product placement will inevitably damage our enjoyment of culture. The ideal is of persuasive placement that merely adds realism to a show, and functions on an unconscious level, but given the frequent lapses in sophistication in even the biggest Hollywood movies, we can’t expect the production crew of Emmerdale to position brands in an unobtrustive yet advertiser-friendly manner. Given the recent outcry from the gaming community about ingame advertising that Peter Walsh examined on these pages recently, we can expect a similar resistance to bullshit from TV viewers. Assuming that audiences with be blithe to product placement badly underestimates them.

The world of augmented reality, the process of adding interactive richness to existing environments like mobile phone interfaces, will also impact harshly upon TV programming via product placement. Claire Beal, writing in the Independent last week, considered the possibilities: “Imagine watching, say, an episode of Mad Men on your iPad, touching the screen when you see a jacket you like, and immediately being able to order it via an online store. At a stroke product placement becomes a measurable, transactionable and immensely more interesting proposition for advertisers and content creators alike.” And creates a sea change in the way we perceive and consume drama.

There’s something to be said for Beal’s vision – imagine the number of times you’ve lusted after a character’s wardrobe, or wanted to know the name of a song playing on the soundtrack – but would this choice inhibit the deep enjoyment we can get from drama? It becomes less a story and more a coathanger for a series of retail opportunities. And that’s without looking at the potential compromises in objectivity for documentaries, fashion shows, food programming and more.

The problem brings to light the curious trade we make when we watch television. The experience is the very definition of mediated – it comes via a television screen – and so to create the crucial feeling of immersion we have to get rid of anything that might remind us that it’s a construct. Advertisers would obviously argue here that brands strengthen the realism; but for the “realness” of a piece of TV to be created, you have to paradoxically create an unreality, portraying not the real world but “TV world” where real world commerce is banned. In a TV show, there is nothing for sale except itself, and that is a rare pleasure in the modern world, and we put up with, nay need, the awkward ordering of non-specific lager to keep it going. Adverts break the spell, but reanimate it a couple of minutes later; product placement disintegrates it throughout the show.

In the end, the only truly brilliant way to combine commerce and television is the unashamedly honest celebration of consumption that is the infomercial. We need less Pepsi cans lying conspicuously around a Hollyoaks set, and more of Mr. T saying things like: “My tastebuds is going wild… I love it when a plan comes together!”

Bad Idea: What inspired you to start Help Me Investigate?

Paul Bradshaw, Help Me Investigate: There were two main inspirations. One was the News Press crowdsourced investigation into utility collection charges in southwest Florida. The key thing for me was how popular that story became on the website – a story that would traditionally not be particularly popular in print, became their most popular story on the site ever, apart from hurricanes, mainly because people were engaged with the story themselves, because it was crowdsourced. So I wanted to provide a platform for that kind of engagement to happen on a more routine basis.

The other inspiration was a story on poisoned pet food in America. The official figures which were being reported in the media were that about 15 pets were affected, so a number of bloggers collaborated to investigate this. They found all sorts of useful things, about which pet foods were affected and so on, and collated a database of I think about 5000 dead pets and 15,000 that were affected. That was about handing the editorial agenda over to a wider section of people than traditionally happens in mainstream media.

BI: Is there a danger in using ordinary people to gather information, people without journalistic grounding? Is the quality of their work always good enough?

PB: There are more non-journalists than journalists using the site, but it’s been harder to train journalists to use it than it has been to train non-journalists. Having said that, journalists are increasingly understanding how it works and contributing some really useful information.

As for the ability of non-journalists to pursue investigations, the key idea behind the site is that it breaks down investigations into different elements, which are called challenges. There are certain things that journalists will be good at, like writing up the story, or getting an official response, or finding particularly hard to find information, like company information or regulations. But there is a lot of specialist knowledge on the site. One particularly big user of the site works in a financial firm, analysing things forensically, so he’s got tremendously valuable data analysis skills which few journalists have, and he’s able to bring that to figures that we get from freedom of information requests. Then there are people who use the site who are particularly knowledgeable about property, or about law. We had an investigation into clamping, and we had a retired law lecturer who added a legal interpretation of the law surrounding clamping and what to do, so that’s been tremendously useful. It’s really about playing to people’s strengths.

BI: So when the data has been collated, is it a case of then finding a journalist to write up and sell the story?

PB: We don’t sell stories, and we don’t write stories for that matter – the site is there to collect evidence. But quite often the investigation gets to a stage where you have to nudge a journalist and say by the way, you might want to get involved at this point. That’s been the case so far. As the site grows in numbers and reputation, and as journalists get more and more used to it, they’ll be more and more involved in the earlier stages.

I think it’ll work in a number of ways. In some instances you’ll get journalists who write a broad story and put all of their raw data onto the site, and ask people help get into the detail of that. We had a national story about hospital parking – we were specifically investigating one particular hospital, and their own figures, compared to some very broad figures obtained by a political party. So it allows you to drill down into that specific detail.

And it works the other way too – you might do a local investigation and then repeat that investigation nationally. You find out the figures in Birmingham, and then you do that for all the councils doing that particular thing.

BI: Is there any potential remuneration for any of your amateur investigators?

PB: There’s a slim chance, a long way down the line, but I’m not banking on that. Really the main reason that people do it is that it affects them personally, so really there shouldn’t be any financial motivation anyway. It’s about having a different editorial agenda, so rather than an editor making a decision that this is a story worth investigating, because it will get us x amount of readers and x amount of advertising, it’s about someone saying this might only affect two people, but we’re really angry about it, and we just need to find other people who are angry about it.

BI: How will the site itself subsist financially?

PB: The original idea was basically around third-party services. A good analogy would be WordPress – WordPress is free, but their business model is based on the spam filter they developed, and also for enterprise versions, so that would be an obvious business model we could work to. It’s quite likely that we’ll also look at some sort of public funding.

But certainly it doesn’t involve advertising, and it’s unlikely that it’ll involve white labelling with news organisations. It’s more likely to be something around: this is what the site does, and because of what we learnt through doing that and the data that’s produced doing that, we can use other things to support it indirectly.

BI: Would you consider a crowdfunding model?

PB: I think it could be one revenue stream, but I don’t imagine it would be big enough to support the whole operation. There would be investigations that require money to progress individually, and we would probably crowdfund for a specific investigation, but for the site as a whole I think it would be very difficult.

BI: Is there a crisis in funding investigative journalism stories in the local press?

PB: Certainly it’s less and less the case that there’s money for it. It’s always been a peripheral activity anyway, it’s never been a core activity; it’s been hard for people to fight for support within an organisation to do it, because quite often it would come to a dead end, and there would be nothing to publish, so that’s been squeezed out increasingly.

Help Me Investigate isn’t necessarily intended to be a replacement. It’s so that journalists who have a lead that they don’t have the time to explore or they don’t think is strong enough to justify spending time on, they could put that on the site, and others who might be passionate about it, or who might owe that journalist something from other investigations, they might do a bit of digging and help them out.

BI: Is investigative journalism antithetical to getting advertising spend? I’d imagine that it’s harder to persuade advertisers to advertise alongside an aggressively investigative story, than it is alongside “softer” content like culture or sport.

PB: I think that’s one of the challenges of news on the web – it gets atomised and broken up. So whereas before your travel supplement might subsidise your foreign news, you’re more likely to split the two apart and just have a travel website. Investigative journalism is always cross-subsidised, so that’s difficult now.

BI: While the high visibility of a crowdsourced investigation is its greatest asset when trying to collate and sort a lot of information, an investigation requiring even the smallest amount of subterfuge could be seriously hampered by crowdsourcing.

PB: Yes, and some investigations wouldn’t be suitable for that reason. Almost all investigations are pre-moderated, and if there was something like that, we’d probably put the person who requested it in touch with an investigative journalist, or point them to some kind of whistleblowing resource.

What Help Me Investigate is useful for is creating a common resource of knowledge, and a community interested in it. For instance, someone has been investigating a company that’s been taking money out of their account without permission; basically they’ve been conned. They found out various information about this company, but they don’t know what to do to get their money back. That information is public, so I recommended they write a blog post so other people who have invested in the same company can easily come across that information.

If I’m investigating the police in one city, then someone can follow what I’ve been doing and repeat that process in another city. It’s about sharing knowledge, but where subterfuge is needed, that is a problem. And we may have private investigations, invited investigations, to make it easier to keep it secret from the subject of that investigation.

BI: Looking at a more nationwide level, is there a serious funding crisis for investigative journalism?

PB: I’m not sure. Some news organisations are looking at paywalls – they’re going to be more driven by readers paying for content, so they’re going to have to get more unique content, which means more investigative journalism. So there may be that commercial pressure in that direction. And if the government changes regulations to make it easier for people to donate towards investigative journalism in order to claim back taxes, then that will link to some news organisations.

There’s certainly pressure on the government in the UK and US. There’s a whole move towards saying if we’re going to subsidise news organisations, then they need to pass the public interest test. Because it could be that it’s not just the BBC who’s receiving licence fee. Ultimately it depends on how the markets develops, and how the government treats regulation and laws and investments.

I think investigative journalism will always exist, but what shape that takes depends on the market. An increasing amount of investigative journalism has been done by organisations, like environmental organisations, animal charities, children’s charities – a lot of these organisations have done undercover reporting or research to find out information that was kept hidden. All those kinds of trends will be important in shaping change. But certainly people should look more broadly than news organisations for investigative journalism in the future.

Photo: John Welsh’s These Digital Times

As Chris James of Massive Inc., a Microsoft subsidiary that handles in-game advertising (IGA) sales, says: “Gaming [advertising] is one of the outliers in the recession with video game industry sales increasing.”

Advertising in games is nothing new: every sports game since the 8-bit generation of video games consoles has, like real world professional sports, been saturated with endorsements. Traditionally, IGA takes the form of in-game billboards or hoardings, but these days it can extends to product placement and filling otherwise dead loading screens with promotional messages.

The current growth is being accelerated by the latest generation of consoles, whose pin sharp graphics and Internet connectivity can deliver tailored adverts to meet changing campaigns across global markets. These new standards also lead to ever-increasing development costs, meaning that games studios are increasingly looking to IGA as a significant source of revenue.

The threshold to accessing such funds is high though, and while the multimillion-selling FIFA football games are soaking up advertising revenue, start-ups and independent outfits hungry for funds receive little consideration.

Beatnik Games is an eight-man development team based in London, who by day code educational games for Channel 4 and by night work on their pet project Plain Sight. The development of their colourful, frenetic combat game was primarily funded by friends and family, and the team is looking at a spring launch through the online distribution system Steam (think iTunes for games). While the team considered implementing IGA, the team’s producer Robin Lacey was reluctant to take the risk: ”I would never gamble the stability of my company on IGA because it is so hit or miss.”

Beatnik has been courted by smaller IGA agencies, but Lacey felt none of them could offer “a viable solution that [made] monetary sense.” While online distribution systems such as Steam and Apple’s App Store for the iPhone have successfully provided opportunities for independent developers to earn revenue from their products, a similar centralised model for IGA has yet to emerge.

The mass adoption of IGA is also subject to its reception by gamers, a demographic who are notorious for their hyper-critical nature. The self-appointed guardians of the medium gleefully point out every instance where they feel advertising oversteps their standards of acceptability. In the summer of 2009, gaming blogs and forums foamed with nerd rage at the news of an intrusive advert in the futuristic racer WipeoutHD for the Sony PS3. The promotion in question was a short spot for the American insurance company State Farm that extended the wait from pressing start to racing by all of ten seconds, just three to four times every hour played. Absurd as this may sound to the non-gamer, the transgression of delaying the action of a paid-for stirred widespread ire and condemnation from vocal Internet hordes. The backlash was so severe that the promotion was pulled within 24 hours of its launch.

Jamie Sefton, the head of Game Republic, a subsidiary of Screen Yorkshire, which supports games companies in Yorkshire and Humber, believes that for all its financial appeal, IGA can backfire on games developers and brands if they do not take the utmost care creating contextually relevant advertising.

“The issue comes for gamers when it’s an advert that jumps them out of the experience,” he says. “If you get it wrong, and have an advert that intrudes on that experience, then it can actually damage the [games] brand, as well as the advertising brand.” James of Massive Inc. also stresses this point, “… Ads need to enhance the overall game experience, never detract from gameplay, and add realism to the game.”

Yet while critics have derided the State Farm commercial in WipeoutHD, they tend to forget Wipeout’s earlier iterations on the Sony PSOne. The extensive Red Bull branding in Wipeout 2097 preceded the launch of the drink in Western markets, introducing gamers to a caffeinated beverage that successfully dovetailed with the unique futuristic vision of the game.

While Beatnik’s Lacey doubts his small team would have the man power to make IGA work, James of Massive Inc. estimates the time he needs to implement an IGA client in larger projects at approximately 20 hours. Lacey doesn’t begrudge the bigger studios, as he thinks their in-house marketing departments “handle it well,” and believes that the “over the top” IGA efforts can actually add realism, mimicking a brand obsessed world in a “less intrusive” manner.

One example of this was the use of IGA in the explosive Burnout racing series, which caught worldwide attention last year when it featured a series of ‘Vote Obama’ in-game billboards that appeared during the American election campaign. The context of a political advert in a video game broke new ground and maximised coverage, becoming a news story in its own right and defined a youthful candidate looking to profile himself against an ageing opponent. Analysts at Screen Digest point to the Obama IGA campaign as a landmark moment in the history of IGA’s growth.

“Video game advertising is moving past the ‘test budget’ phase,” says Massive Inc.’s James. “Many marketers and agencies are now incorporating video game ad campaigns in their broader marketing plans and allocating dollars earlier in the process.”

Industry wide efforts are also being made through the Interactive Advertising Bureau to establish a universal standard for quantifying IGA exposure. Modern games can precisely measure advert impressions in terms of the quality of depiction and prominence (angle, size, lighting), and in terms of user exposure (how long the message is viewable on screen, and how frequently), and then instantly feed this data back to ad buyers. The hope is that this transparent measurement will make the IGA market more attractive to a wider range of new advertisers, and provide commercial momentum.

With these impression metrics becoming more defined, companies like Massive Inc. are initiating ventures with digital research companies to measure the depth of IGA’s impact on consumers more accurately; Microsoft are currently beta testing a new game on the Xbox’s online service ‘Live’ that promises to integrate market polling data with precisely targeted IGA messages.

This market data is polled in the disguised form of a free to play online game, an adaptation of the American quiz show 1vs100. The 1vs100 game ‘screens’ at specific primetime slots, placing players (or rather their avatars) directly into the show, where they are asked to answer multiple choice questions on trivia, and compete in a national competition for Xbox ‘credits’ and occasional real-world prizes like consoles, televisions and cars. Like its TV counterpart, the online 1vs100 contains short advert breaks, a trade-off that gamers, just as viewers at home, seem willing to accept.

While the pub-quiz standard questions might feel innocuous at first though, every response is monitored by Microsoft, who use it to accumulate blocks of marketable data. If only 30% of a typical Friday night audience of 40,000 knew the exact name of the big Hollywood blockbuster due out the following week, Microsoft could easily approach the relevant parties with opportunities for IGA with a quantifiable value attached to it. Provided Microsoft is able to prove to advertising buyers there is a measurable link between fresh audiences and their adverts, and participating gamers do not revolt, the 1vs100 game will pay for its development costs several times over.

IGA remains an emerging advertising channel competing in a wider advertising market that has shrunk in the global recession, and is hyper-competitive like never before. However, Google has proven that emerging technologies that connect previously untapped online audiences with relevant, highly measurable advertising have the potential to become monumentally profitable - and few media can compete with videogames when it comes to attracting young eyeballs.

If the main players in IGA can refrain from stepping too heavily on the sensitive toes of gamers, the market has the potential to outstrip all digital advertising fields outside of search.

What is ‘crowdfunding’? It’s when the money for a project is sourced from a wide base of people paying a relatively small amount, rather than a handful of investors who pay a lot more.

In a financially turbulent period for media, where the high cost of investigative journalism is becoming prohibitive for even the bigger news producers, Cohn’s model is one of the few ways that time-consuming, challenging journalism is being funded in the Bay Area. Spot.Us allows ordinary people to put their money towards information they value, and illuminate it for for the rest of their community.

We spoke with Cohn about the origins, finances and ideologies of Spot.Us, and how its revolutionary model fits into the rest the US media landscape.

Bad Idea: How did Spot.Us come about?

David Cohn: It was a confluence of things. I was the research assistant for a guy called Jeff Howe, who coined the phrase ‘crowdsourcing’– and in journalism, when you coin a phrase, you get a book deal, so I was his research assistant. I was researching the chapter on crowdfunding, things like kiva.org [an online microloans organisation] and I was thinking: can some of these same principles be applied to journalism?

The other part came out of being a freelancer. I was a freelance journalist for a while, and I really had the sense that the system by which freelancers work is somewhat antiquated. When they do freelancing it’s not that different from before the internet. Before, they would send snail mail to an editor, and the editor would decide whether or not they’re going to publish it. Now, they’re sending email, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same; it’s a one-to-one communication. And I wanted to see a system where freelancers could work in a much better market.

BI: How does the story-generation process work?

DC: All stories start with a pitch. It can be from an independent reporter, a news organisation, or from Spot.Us itself. If there’s an independent reporter working on it, then we’ll try and find a news organisation who’ll work with us [to publish the story]; if the pitch has come from a news organisation or from Spot.Us, then we’ll try and assign a reporter to it. Then we raise some money around it, and the reporter goes out and starts reporting. Then when they come back, if we’re not already working with a news organisation we’ll try to set up first publishing rights; if we’re able to, then the money goes back to the original donors so they can reinvest. Then we publish the story and have a beer.

BI: How have news organisations reacted to the idea?

DC: It goes back and forth – some news organisations are really easy to work with, and some still aren’t quite sure how to engage with other organisations. For example, working with Santa Cruz Weekly was really simple – they got the concept straightaway. Other organisations require seven meetings just to explain the concept to all the decision makers, then they decide whether or not to do it, then they decide who should be the one to engage with us… it’s three months of bureaucracy for something that should take two weeks. With the right news organisation we can fund a story in two or three weeks. So some news organisations are not necessarily beating down our door, because they’re not really equipped to work with other people. Other news organisations are.

BI: Is it the case that the larger the news organisation, the more bureaucratic it is?

DC: The larger as news organisation is, the harder it is to work with them, but then again I was surprised as all hell when I approached The New York Times for a story. Granted we met in person, but I just had one meeting with one key decision maker. The New York Times: you think they’d be the hardest to try and work with, but kudos to them – they were the lightest on their feet in terms of organisations we’ve worked with.

BI: Spot.us is obviously a reaction to the current state of investigative journalism – just how bad is it at the moment in the States?

DC: It’s definitely more bleak than it used to be. They don’t have the same resources to do investigations that they used to. I don’t think they’ve lost the will completely, I just think it’s becoming harder and harder for them.

Investigative journalism is always a loss leader – there is no way to make a profit off investigative reporting from advertising. That never happened, even in the past. But because classifieds were so robust, they could spend money on investigative reporting, and that was considered good for your brand. Now, since they don’t have the same profits from classifieds, are you going to dedicate your money to something that was making you money in the past, or are you going to go with the thing that never made you money? They’ll go with the thing that makes them money, even at the expense of their brand. Nobody likes it, but they accept it.

BI: Is Spot.us managing to make enough money?

DC: It depends. It’s enough to do what we want – nobody enters journalism because of money.

It’s important to know that we’re an experiment, and in transition – we’re still figuring out what this marketplace looks like, so it’s something that we’re evolving as we go. Non-profit journalism is making a rise in America, and that might be because we’re in this transition period. But investigative journalism might stay non-profit for a long time – either we’re in a period of transition, or a period of [permanent] change. Investigative journalism may never be supported by classified advertising ever again.

We have a couple of different sources of revenue. When people donate they are encouraged, but not required to donate 10% more to the operation of the site, and the majority of people do that, so that gives us a little bit of money. The 10% is almost enough to fund our hosting costs and other miscellaneous costs, so I feel pretty good about that. So as we expand to other cities, that too will expand.

There are other possible revenue streams, like advertising – I’m not against advertising on an ideological level or anything, so we might use that. Right now, the amount that we can make is so little that it’s not really worth it, but again if we expand it might make sense. We could also become a wire service, and syndicate our content.

BI: So Spot.Us is just one part of a larger revenue model?

DC: It is not the revenue stream. It’s naïve to think there’s any single revenue stream that’s going to replace what was a single revenue stream. Before, you had classified and advertising that paid for everything, because there was a monopoly on distribution. Now, the distribution is itself distributed, anyone can distribute, so the revenue streams are going to be distributed too.

I never try to sell Spot.us as something that will fund an entire news organisation, or fund an entire person’s career. We are ourselves going to be distributed, we’re raising money for all kinds of news organisations. I think that this kind of community-funded reporting could support anywhere from 5% to 30% of a news organisation’s revenue stream once it’s mature, but it’ll never support an entire news organisation.

BI: What with your crowdfunding business model, it seems like crowdsourcing would be a natural fit. Would you consider working on creating stories with the Spot.Us community?

DC: That’s possible. Essentially Spot.Us is trying to find out how to distribute the financial load of journalism, but we are going to try and branch out a little bit in the future at how to distribute the workload.

BI: A potential flaw with crowdfunded investigative journalism is that you have to announce what you want to write about before investigating it. Is that a significant weakness?

DC: It’s a weakness in that a lot of people have this concern, but I think it’s an antiquated concern if I’m honest. I guess there are some instances where you don’t want to broadcast, if it’s going to hurt a source – if you’re investigating the Mafia, you don’t want to put that on Spot.Us.

But the concern is often about scoops, and competition: “I don’t want another journalist to do this story first”. But scoops have the half-life of a link, which is very short, and in fact, by proclaiming the space and putting the pitch up there, you’ve already scooped everybody – you can elbow out that space. Even if people do similar articles you can link to it, incorporate that and call it ‘back reporting’ – they’ve done some of your research.

I think it’s naïve to think that stories are one-offs and the first person to do it is the only person who gets to do it right and everybody else sucks. And even if that is the case, you should put your pitch up as soon as possible, so if someone else does it you can point to it and say I knew this was going to happen and I’m working on it as well, and I’m going to do an even better job because you’ve already done some of it.

I think scoops have actually damaged journalism. Part of the reason why journalism is where it is, is because it created a sense of competition among journalists, which was good a long time ago but now, we have the ability to work with each other so easily, and we’re not using it because of this striving for scoops.

BI: So is there still an old-school approach to news in some newsrooms, that also manifests itself, for example, in a distrust of blogs?

DC: Some do still have that approach. Blogging is a content management system, not a type of reporting – you can’t say that’s ‘just a blog’, that’s like saying that’s just a piece of paper. What Spot.Us is doing is already way out there, and if they don’t understand what’s happening with blogging, they definitely aren’t going to understand Spot.Us. I also tend now to pick and choose my battles – it might not be worth it to try and engage with those news organisations.

But I think there is a lot of innovation in news organisations. I think we’re working out what the next model is going to be, and I think we need 10,000 startups, right? But I think news organisations are part of those startups, they’re trying to reinvent themselves too.

BI: A lot of the success of Spot.Us rests on whether the donors trust in journalists. Do you feel like you’re fostering enough of that trust?

DC: I think in journalism trust is always an issue, whether you’re trusting the organisation or you’re trusting the writer. Increasingly it’s going to be about trusting the writer; individual journalists are going to have their own independent careers, and people are going to like and dislike individual reporters just as much as they would have in the past liked or disliked news organisations. There’s a lot of trust in the writers, and usually with a pitch, a certain percentage of the donors know and like the reporter already. They already have a relationship.

BI: Do readers value investigative journalism enough, to pay for something that doesn’t directly affect them?

DC: That’s the million-dollar question – whether or not the public will view journalism as a civic duty that is worthy of their donation. We try and make it fun – you get to pick where your money is going to go, you can pick your cause. But in the end I don’t have a definitive answer to that – it’s what we’re trying to find out.

Do you live in the Bay Area and have a pitch to send David? Email him at david@spot.us, or visit www.spot.us for more information on donations and pitches.

Illustration: Vaughan Ward

Advances in neuroscience are being adopted by marketing and advertising industries keen to show the efficacy of their communication in an era of falling budgets. Companies such as the Boston-based Innerscope have developed a cheap and effective way of monitoring part of the brain’s response to media. From this data, they create ‘Engagement maps – moment by moment analysis of the audience’s emotional response to the media stimuli.’ Welcome to neuromarketing, where brands and marketers push the frontier of consciousness in search of an answer that perennial question: do you like me?

”Emotions are our quick decision makers,” explains Gareth Ellis, senior planner at Saatchi and Saatchi. “On the most basic level, emotions instruct our instinct: Fight or flight. We have a saying here, ‘Reason leads to conclusion but emotion leads to action.’”

Saatchi and Saatchi have developed their own language of love, specifically the terminology of ‘lovemarks’: brands that don’t just inspire admiration, but ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’. ‘Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind,’ explains the official website, ‘creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever.’ But how do you create that emotional connection? Opinion is divided. While some are attracted to neuromarketing’s promise of monitoring the emotional responses of an individual’s brain, other experts feel that the answer to emotional engagement lies in the culture, in the domain of signs and symbols known as semiotic analysis. Many brand managers will engage a grab bag of these feuding experts and pick and mix from their advice. The various sects and dogmas of Marketing are treated expediently by their clients though: they just want an approach that works.

Gareth Ellis was the planner behind T-Mobile’s advert ‘Dance’, which saw an outbreak of choreographed joy in Liverpool Street Station in January 2009. ‘Dance’ won a Golden Lion at the Cannes 56th International Advertising Festival in recognition of its impact as a pop culture phenomenon (13 million views on YouTube and counting). Launched against a backdrop of a wintry recession, but with the tailwind of hope blowing in from Barack Obama’s imminent inauguration, its communal dancing in the grim, banal surroundings of Liverpool Street Station was a celebration of the human spirit, an outbreak of pure positive emotion.

The most prominent adverts of the age seem to swerve around the rational to light up an emotional response. Chocolate is equated with sex in advertising, specifically female masturbation. The famous Cadbury’s Gorilla, made by top creative house Fallon, took an unsung toiler, a drummer, combined it with the physical discomfort of a gorilla suit, and gave them their moment in the sun. On an unconscious level, the gorilla’s drum solo was a moment of solitary orgasm. The gorilla suit is the body horror that regular female consumers of chocolate feel. And the drummer is the person at the back who does all the work – a position that resonates with a target audience weighed down by thankless domestic chores. That’s my back-of-the-envelope interpretation, none of which diminished the pure joy the advert aroused in viewers

On a rational level, the advert seemed incongruous – on an emotional level, we understood it. Think also of Sony Bravia’s coloured balls pouring down the hills of San Francisco – a refined visual expression of giddiness with only the subtlest appeal to the rational (the balls enact the promise of the television’s vivid detailed colours).  Music also plays a prominent role in these three adverts, from Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ to Jose Gonzalez’s ‘Heartbeats’, for its power to unconsciously influence feeling.

On June 8 2009, Andre Marquis Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Innerscope, a three-year-old biometrics research company, gave a lecture at Google. Here he presented his company’s methods and their belief in the crucial role of our primitive emotional responses in the choices we make, citing obesity as an example of how “our cognitive mind has a minimum effect upon our decision making”. “Neuroscience has figured out that emotions are what drives us,” he continued. “Everything we do is filtered by our emotions first. What you see and what you experience is influenced by what you are feeling on a second-by-second basis.”

At Innerscope, viewers wearing light wireless biometric vests are shown adverts in a ‘clutter reel’; that is, the advert is surrounded by trailers and film clips to reflect the way we encounter advertising within a stream of other culture. These biometric vests are a shift away from the use of functioning magnetic resonance image scanners (fMRI) – the big white doughnuts into which subjects are slowly immersed – or the older electroencephelogram (EEG), a collection of scalp sensors that pick up activity in the various lobes of the upper cortex, both of which have been and still are used in other practises of neuromarketing. The vests are cheaper and less claustrophobic than a fMRI, and unlike an EEG, they focus upon the emotional limbic system.

The emotional limbic system, sometimes referred to as the ‘lizard brain’, evolved to ensure our survival. Emotions influence what we pay attention to and what we remember. ‘The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals,’ writes Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works. Emotions make decisions. In the Romanic view of the brain, reason and emotion are separate – like Kirk and Spock. Pinker demonstrates that there is no line between thinking and feeling: cognition and emotion function simultaneously and in tandem. Without fear, how would Spock have realised that defending himself against a Klingon was more important than playing a round of Vulcan chess?  In the limbic system, the amygdala is the specific nuclei responsible for processing and storing the memory of emotional reactions. It is an almond-shaped organ buried in each temporal lobe that fires signals to the whole brain. Experiments have shown that the injection of chemicals into the amygdala of rats influence their ability to recall tasks or indeed to forget them.

Innerscope partnered with the global research group OTX to bring their biometric methods to the UK. “The OTX scale has two axis – one is emotion and the other is cognitive. And ‘Dance’ was off the scale,” explains Gareth Ellis. “Some people take the view that advertising in the UK needs to be either incredibly emotional or incredibly rational – so either Cadburys Gorilla and Andrex Puppy, or a hard sell of the message, like Direct Line.”

(Direct Line recently resurrected the motif of their renowned 1980s adverts, a red phone on wheels that repeatedly beeps a chirpy signature jingle. In a recession, the insurance advertiser’s love of repetition is apparent to anyone unfortunate enough to watch daytime television; this mimetic sub-genre attained beery genius with the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign for the car insurance website Comparethemarket.com, which relies on the brain’s stubborn response to error to keep it at the forefront of your perception).    

Greg Rowland, expert in brand semiotics and the founder of Greg Rowland Semiotics, suggests that the emotion vs. rational thought split is often a false dichotomy. “Emotion that isn’t tethered to a product reality can easily float away into pure entertainment, with no tangible benefit for the brand. There is no such thing as pure rationality in advertising – unless perhaps one day a laundry advert displays the chemical compounds for their detergent and nothing else. There is nothing that is entirely emotional or rational. ‘Emotional’ can mean ‘does this create a guiding set of metaphors that connect with culture and engaging symbolism?’ Rational can mean ‘does this suggest something useful I can use in life?’ But ultimately, they are just convenient abstractions.”

For marketeers, emotion is their weapon on the battleground of memory. As you walk through the supermarket, processing the thousands of possible choices, in a state of consumer flux between habit and potential experimentation, which products you select could be determined by your emotional memory. Advertising and marketing is about changing habitual behaviour. That is why younger audiences are so valuable to marketers: catch young minds prior to imprinting with brand habits. The further along the timeline of habit a consumer is, the more expensive it becomes to convince them to change. The amygdala’s role in emotional response and learning makes it seem like the sweetspot in changing habit. Although it works in tandem with the higher cortex, the bulk of its work is unconscious.

“Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists contend that the unconscious mind controls as much as 95% of human behaviour,” writes Dr. Neale Martin in his book Habit: The 95% of Behaviour Marketers Ignore. Martin advances a dual mind theory and insists that for too long marketers have been aiming their messages at the wrong mind. Martin moots two distinct types of mental processing: the executive mind, where conscious cognition occurs, and the habitual mind, which regulates the body, and stores our responses to previously learned behaviours.  “If the purchase enters conscious awareness, the realm of the executive mind, it is quite likely that your customer will re-evaluate your offering as well as your competitors.” Better that our consumption of brands remains on the unconscious level of habit.

The underlying trend to these commercial applications of neuroscience is to circumvent the thinking mind. You don’t need a wireless biometric jacket to know that if marketing is to be influential, it needs to tap into an audience’s feelings. But neuromarketing’s promise of more accurate evaluation of the very part of the brain responsible for setting and acting upon goals is particularly alluring.

Greg Rowland is not impressed. Semiotic analysis of brands comes at the matter from a humanities perspective. Spend ten minutes with this brand semiotician and you will feel like you have met the puppet master.

“Neuromarketing presupposes the human being to be a self-sufficient and self-contained consciousness,” explains Rowland,  “and that is not how culture and response works. In the world of cultural theory, we are empty vessels through which identity and symbols pour. So when you dig further into the brain, you are still pursuing the idea that somewhere within the deepest recesses of the brain lies the answer to engaging with a mass audience. I am sure that in ten years time, we will send nanobots out to bring back the chemicals from individual nodes of the brain so that we can gauge the response to an ad. But digging deeper and deeper is the wrong principle.”

By comparison to the scientific promise of neuromarketing, semiotic analysis may seem rarefied. “But it can lead to effective insight,” says Rowland, “and creative inspiration rather than simple evaluation.” 

It was Rowland’s semiotic observation that Pot Noodle is to real food what pornography is to sex that inspired the famous Pot Noodle “Slag of all snacks” positioning. He uses the example of his recent work with Rexona (Sure) deodorant in Russia to explain the shortcomings of evaluative methods such as neuromarketing:

“The idea was to adopt the strong tone of a Putin in the advertising. To create a 1960s strong-arm paranoia around body odour. [Advertising agency] Lowe’s execution of this idea showed a tattooed pig living in a smelly woman’s armpit. A lot of women were deeply offended. If the ad had been tested by neuromarketeers, it would never have gone ahead. The biometrics would have shown utter disgust. But the ad was highly effective in actually persuading Russians to buy Rexona, and has been used as a template in other countries – although pigs were swapped for goats in Indonesia, for understandable reasons.”

Neuroscientific insight into the role of emotions in decision-making is informing the creative work of advertisers and marketers. The most acclaimed adverts of our times have combined music and feeling with a lateral appeal to the unconscious. Yet its main application as another way of evaluating creative concepts only further emphasises how distrustful corporate culture has become of the creative. It is safer to biometrically wire up twenty people to tell you which trailer to promote your film, rather than to trust to your own instinct. Yet it is creative instinct and insight that make adverts like ‘Dance’. ‘Dance’ was filmed and edited in a day before being broadcast. There was no time to test it.

Neuromarketing is a focus group of the emotions set up to evaluate an existing idea. Perhaps if marketers and advertisers invested more in the creation of interesting and entertaining ideas, and less on measuring them, they would make more effective adverts. Put simply, they are overthinking. They need to feel it.

Illustrations by William Davis

Last week at the IAB Engage conference we saw AOL’s Jeff Levick slagging the UK advertising market off as being obsessed with the X Factor ad slots, and neglecting the online space. Now, in an article in Ad Age, a whole host of industry heavyweights line up to pillory UK advertising. “There is a tendency to default to the safety of TV and posters”, says David Droga, formerly of Saatchi and Saatchi; “Creativity is at an all-time low in the U.K… The new interactive model requires a new mindset and a new skill set. Not everyone is able or willing to make the transition”, accuses Steve Henry, former exec creative at TBWA; “We are struggling to find a direction”, says Jeremy Craigen, exec creative at DDB.

Meanwhile, this blog over at Brand Republic notes research that shows how little advertising agencies are genuinely engaging with social networking, regarding blogs/Twitter/Facebook as things to be seen to be doing, rather than things that could actually get you traction.

So why this malaise? Part of it could be the reluctance of the creative end to engage with the fragmented online advertising space compared with the epic canvases of outdoor and the storytelling of TV. As one of the interviewees in the Ad Age piece suggests, there is a greater level of public discussion about advertising in the UK than in the US – we’re likely to talk about the latest Honda campaign as much as Jedward or Jordan over the watercooler. This has led to a climate of ad-creative-as-auteur, which dangerously pushes campaigns onto pedestals away from the public; there’s a latent sense of online, with its primacy to the consumer, is somehow debasing the creative’s “art”.

Charlie Brooker notes today how Christmas ad campaigns for M&S, B&Q and others are descending into embarrassing self-referentiality – there’s a depressing blend of fawning and misplaced self-regard from the creatives who made them. Fawning at the brands, flattering them that they’re part of the magic of Christmas; and self-regard at the very adverts themselves as being an integral element of the population’s Christmas cheer. Good luck guys – it took Coca-Cola decades and a world of invented iconography before they created even a whiff of the potent nostalgia and magical realism that denotes Christmas warmth, with their ongoing “Holidays Are Coming” campaign.

In the chicken-or-egg conundrum of online advertising, is it the creatives’ uninspiring campaigns that keep premiums low? The buyers’ selling of these campaigns short? The brands’ love for the grandeur of traditional advertising? This circular lack of faith reinforces itself with every turn. But why? Mass media is a terrible way of reaching your audience – a ton of money thrown at a wall with the hope that a fraction of it bounces back to you. Messages get lost in audience passivity, capricious demographics, vandalism, reluctance and even hostility to the messages. Online display advertising is still prey to those pitfalls – but online can potentially provide a level of subtlety, seduction and positive audience engagement that traditional channels can only dream of. And that should be commanding far more money than a bus shelter.

All absurdly old hat wisdom of course – yet apparently not to the UK market. UK creatives need to stop trying to come up with the next watercooler moment and start the devious, moneymaking business of truly getting inside people’s heads, something that the online space can do with new and terrifying levels of effectiveness.

AOL’s president of global advertising and strategy, Jeff Levick, built up content creators’ hopes before dashing them within a single speech. He appealed to brands to spend more online, and in more innovative and fragmented ways in order to deal with a niche, fragmented audience. The days of chucking a few ideas at billboards and the X Factor breaks are over: “Niche is the new mass”. If they heed his words, that means a more diverse pattern of investment from advertisers, broken up across the media landscape, from brands that are starting to really have faith in online as a place to create sales. That means a bigger spend, and more cash for more people.

But then the classic nightmarish vision for content producers presented itself once more: Levick said there was “a real opportunity to mash advertising closer to content creation… Over the next 12 months we’re going to see advertising sit much closer to the content”. His ugly choice of words is apt: he’s encouraging that nirvana for brands where the audience is receiving “content” funded by the advertiser, advertorial in other words.

It’s almost unfashionable to speak out against this these days, and that there’s a kind of snobbery in doing so – suggesting that content should be independent of commerce is beginning to be seen as quaint, elitist, even Luddite. Brands often frame this content/advertising mashing as a win-win situation, giving consumers content that they want while getting brands closer to consumers than ever before; and they’re pushing this line hard, as if it’s inevitable and the only format they’re willing to pay a decent premium for. But I’m not convinced by this. Do consumers really enjoy cookery shows where chefs open jars of Dolmio, for instance? There needs to be some very indepth research into audience attitudes to advertorial content before brands can start pushing it as gospel.

Subtle product placement, while arguably more sinister and insidious, is still much better for consumers than the experience of a heavily, blithely branded TV show, book, or concert – when the pockets of pure experience afforded by art and entertainment become smoothed into a constant arc of commerce, is when life becomes very depressing indeed.

Then there’s Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK MD, cosying up to the room and saying that advertising will remain the chief source of revenue for online content producers – and in his vision of the future, the TV screen will give way to a world of screens with video content embedded all around us. Fair enough, but the question here has to be: given the level of engagement from the consumer with targeted online advertising and increasing levels of online video advertising, why are the premiums so much lower than for passive mass-media adverts?

Elsewhere in his speech, his future screen-world leaves Hollywood adaptations of Philip K Dick novels with a lot to answer for, and he said “ubiquitous and disposable” low-end netbooks would provide a constant stream of video content – hmm, doesn’t exactly sound wonderfully sustainable though. 

And elsewhere in the conference, nascent new media guru Stephen Fry was wheeled out to talk about Twitter, mobile evangelists of various stripes tried to get people not just to think about the iPhone, and Mark Lund, chief exec of the Central Office of Information, said that he wanted to join up citizens and the government better via the internet, and that digital is “the plasma that runs through media ecology”. Lovely, unprofitable plasma.

Murdoch began earlier this year by saying that the Sunday Times would start to have its own site, and have it hidden behind a paywall. Then he announced that all his newspaper sites would have to be paid for, and that the change would come next June. But now he’s admitted that it’s going to take longer than that, and that he’s currently consulting other newspaper owners about how to charge online. That’s pricked the ears of lawyers, who say that discussions over pricing could be illegal under competition law – though they could feasibly be discussing a joint venture over how to universalise charging for content. Could this be the big step forward for a Journalism Online-style venture? Might they even use Journalism Online itself?

Perhaps the most aggressive feature of all this is Murdoch now saying that the stories on his sites would be blocked from Google’s news search, once the paywalls come up. Will people shell out more to read stories at the Sun or the Times rather than other, still-free news sites? Undoubtedly fewer – but with online ad margins as they are, Murdoch can afford to lose sheer hit counts and still make more money from subscriptions. And if enough newspapers all sign up for paywalls, as these anti-trust murmurings seem to suggest, then the level of impact on Murdoch’s papers would be spread more evenly across the sector. Interesting though that the Guardian, in reporting this story, have reiterated their intentions to stay free.

Murdoch needs the extra money – as well as haemorrhaging it down an office-shaped well, MySpace is losing money it had planned to get off Google as part of its $900m advertising tie-up with the company. It’s not had the level of traffic it promised to Google, and now looks set to lose around $100m of the deal. The dismantling of Fox Interactive Media lost money too, but other areas of his empire, like TV and film, are back on the up again after a terrible couple of quarters; his cable stations’ profits went up by 41%, but there’s still a long way to go before its making the $1bn+ profits it was raking pre-recession, hence the eagerness to start charging online.

Quite apart from the money issues, Murdoch’s been involved in a couple of major power struggles over the last week too. First of all, the results of the Press Complaints Commission inquiry into that rather damning Guardian story alleging phone hacking by Sun journalists have come back, and they’re predictably toothless. The PCC has said there isn’t enough evidence to prove it; the Guardian points out that the PCC hasn’t been able to do any of its own original investigations and hasn’t spoken to the police or anyone at the heart of the scandal, and described it as “complacent”. So Murdoch is off the hook, but perhaps not for long – MPs are already promising that a Commons enquiry would be much more vigorous.

Murdoch has also been playing power games with Aussie PM Kevin Rudd. Murdoch, who owns two-thirds of Australia’s newspapers, slagged him as “delusional” and said he couldn’t take criticism; he then not very subtly pointed out that he just dropped his support of Gordon Brown, and that while he didn’t tell editors what to print/believe, he was responsible for hiring them. In other words: “You’re mine, Rudd!”

In my mind when I first heard about this I saw a full-page, flexible screen with flashes pointlessly shimmering down it a la any Philip K Dick story adapted by Hollywood. The reality is a tiny wee screen housed in some cardboard pages that’s sure to annoyingly interrupt your enjoyment of all the beautiful people.

Lamer yet is when you find out that this is costing CBS thousands and thousands of dollars, and is only getting put in mags for subscribers in LA and NYC. Not sure how the numbers got crunched here, and the channel is keeping quiet on budgets, but I think it was conceived in their “cool stuff that makes it look like we’re really innovative, no matter how unsustainable the cost” department. Admittedly the traction is getting increased by people like us talking about it, but the reality is that this campaign just isn’t going to reach enough people to justify its cost. With ad margins getting smaller mid-recession, this kind of showboating seems like a dangerous course to take.

If you do expensive, limited experiments, do them like Fallon recently did with their Make Me A Supermodel campaign. By creating an interactive shop window, they wrung every bit of engagement from and exposure to its audience, which was constantly refreshing itself on the pavement in front. By contrast, CBS’s video screens have much less reach, and will look very average once the battery runs out. They also have to be inserted by hand, which makes the whole thing take on a distinctly pre-Cambrian tone.  

But perhaps the most annoying aspect of this whole thing is the stuff its actually advertising, the toxically unfunny “comedies” How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two And A Half Men, and new show Accidentally On Purpose, whose title alone makes it sound like it’s straight out of a two-minute brainstorm in 1986. These are shows which can only be enjoyed when off work with swine flu, when ER seems like Len Loach and when you need a show with an extra-loud laugh track to flag the jokes up for your tired, monged-out brain. If this is the future, then its sitcoms still suck.

After BT said it didn’t have plans to roll out the technology, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin dropped their plans too. BT cited its “commitment to developing next-generation broadband and television services”, and said it didn’t have the resources available to roll out Phorm too. So it’s not ruling it out altogether, but its a blow for Phorm, who are pouring money away without any sign of revenue being generated on a large scale, and who (now embarrassingly) announced that BT would be moving forward with the technology back in December. The FT reports that Phorm are now looking overseas for other ISPs to hop on board.

They must be wondering what went wrong. They made friends in high places, got Ofcom on board, and got shedloads of investment (with their latest £15m turning up less than a month ago). If Phorm does go down the tubes, it’ll be down to a few small but crucial errors – the testing of BT customers without their permission, their paranoid and ranting Stop Phoul Play site.

But they’ve also been hampered by the hazy general distrust from the public of anything that follows what you do online, even if it doesn’t store the information or identify you, as Phorm claim. Tim Berners-Lee was a high profile example of this lack of faith, saying: “To allow someone to snoop on your internet traffic is to allow them to put a television camera in your room, except it will tell them a whole lot more about you than the television camera”. This is quite an unfair comparison if Phorm’s technology works in the way they say it does – at no point can you be identified as you remain an anonymous number throughout the process.

But the ISPs and sites realise how much privacy means to their customers, and how toxic it would be to be thought of as untrustworthy spies – Amazon cut ties with Phorm after just one customer complaint. The resistance from the like of NoDPI and the Register has been pretty formidable too.

So it looks like a victory for the privacy campaigners, but for how long? BT still essentially have faith in targeted advertising – they didn’t postpone the rollout because of privacy issues. If Phorm manage to last long enough, they could be back, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that if it’s not them, it’ll be someone else in a few years time.

Spake author Arash Amel to the Financial Times: “Online video is not mature enough and won’t mature quickly enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional TV advertising”. But he did say that that gap could be closed within five years if the networks were “aggressive” enough. Does that mean the kind of advertising online that you currently get on US TV, where the light and shade of a primetime drama is erased under the 1000-watt lamps of incessantly yapping “soda” “commercials” every 10 minutes? I’ll start watching Cash In The Celebrity Attic just because I know its not going anywhere.

Screen Digest pissed on another bonfire recently by saying that Blu-Ray isn’t going to make up for diminishing DVD sales – they only made up $482m of the $26.4bn DVD and Blu-Ray sales and rental market last year. While that was a four-fold increase of Blu-Ray sales on the previous year, this curve isn’t going exponentially enough, mostly thanks to people not really noticing the difference between it and DVD, and gearing up for downloading or streaming HD video off the net.

And Screen Digest aren’t predicting big things for in-game advertising either, saying only 1.5% of global ad spend will be on the format in 2014. This seems depressingly small – global sales of the current generation of consoles are now over 100m worldwide, and the most popular games are communal ones like Wii Sports and Guitar Hero. That’s a lot of people, most of them youngish and with a lot of disposable income. Do brands still have the squeamishness towards gaming that the UK government is trying hard to shake off?