Capturing insights at the Neuromarketing World Forum 2019

The Neuromarketing World Forum 2019 took place in Rome last week, bringing together academics, clients and research vendors to the eternal city. Head of EyeSee’s Paris office Jean-Francois Sonder attended this unique event. With many interesting speakers and insights coming from the likes of Uber, Henkel, Formula 1 and other high-profile research companies and institutions, the Forum brought together key players from a niche that is bridging the gap between the academia and business – to the benefit of consumer science. Here is the breakdown of the biggest impressions and key insights that were shared on the stage.

Higher standards for digital insights suppliers

In 2017, digital ads in the US finally dethroned TV as the king of ad spending after its very long and prosperous reign. By 2020, it is projected that digital ads – namely giants Google and Facebook (with Amazon set to stir the lineup in the coming years) – will make up for as much as 50% of all advertising spending. To put that in perspective, that is almost $130 billion of projected spending on digital ads in 2019.

But, with great power comes great responsibility – the burden of reliability and validity falls on the backs of players such as Facebook. Ingrid Nieuwenhuis, Neuroscientist at Facebook’s Center for Marketing Science Innovation spoke to the forum about metric reliability in the field of consumer neuroscience. The need for accuracy and validation in the work we do cannot be overstated – regardless, some researchers and companies are taking a freewheeling approach. Nieuwenhuis emphasized the importance of correct ad metrics, since errors in data or analysis process are likely to happen and easy to miss – so how do we achieve that? Start off by designing a strong and detailed framework for analysis, along with a set of checks and reliability quantifiers. By requiring academic validation of the tests from their suppliers, Facebook is setting a standard for the entire community – and anyone who fails to catch up, might soon feel left out of the neuro pack.

Combination of research methods works the best

Texan airline giant Southwest Airlines is the biggest low-cost carrier in the world, and the largest domestic carrier in the US. For a company this big to have a 40% bounce rate on the sale landing page means that the shopping flow is gravely interrupted and turning customers away. That’s why they left nothing to chance during their UX study and combined both an in-depth survey and biometric implicit methods to get a firm grip on the emotional engagement of the users tasked with finding a specific offer on the page. The results were clear: the two enhanced designs achieved 100% and 88% ease of use respectively, in comparison to that of 38% on the old page. Performance-wise, the shopping increased by 20%, bounce rate reduced by 8.6% and their air transactions increased by 0.3%.

Creativity is (still) the biggest sales driver

Mars Wrigley Confectionery conducted a huge study of their mobile advertising providing us with actionable tips regarding YouTube pre-roll ads. The study showed that 70% of the branding is missed by respondents, most of them click on the “Skip ad” button as soon as it shows up on the screen, and they only look at the ad 25% of the time. This makes competing for their attention even more difficult. There are three key pieces of advice to draw from this – that also confirm our findings from mobile ad research: attention and emotion need to be tracked together; (even bigger) branding should be an integral part of the storytelling; and adaptation to different screen sizes is essential. For all of this to work, though, the prerequisite is the creative. The same study, based on 500 different campaigns, found that with 47%, creative is still the biggest driver of sales across all media platforms.

If you want to read more insightful content from this year’s industry events, check out our key takeaways from the IIeX EU conference in Amsterdam and Journée Nationale des Etudes (JNE).

We are looking forward to attending the forum in sunny LA next year!

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