EmSense

Last week’s On The Media had a piece about the EmSense corporation. You can hear that piece here:

Here’s an encounter with advertising on a deeply personal level. Actually, EmSense is not an encounter at all, but a measurement of your encounter with advertising. What the corporation does is sell to marketers the ability to track consumers’ physiological responses to their ads.

This, of course, is nothing new. Douglas Rushkoff’s documentary “The Persuaders” (part 5: “Give Us What We Want”) looks at political strategists using the same techniques, monitoring individuals’ physiological responses to a candidate’s speech.

The encounter with advertising is one that takes place on more than just the cognitive level. Marketers have a definite stake in being able to measure that encounter and to track it for their purposes. The best defense, then, is a good offense. When we pay attention, ourselves, to what our bodies are doing in response to advertising, we’re a step ahead of anyone who would use those responses against us.

Alta Vista Said “Yes!”

I encounter this billboard on the 215 Freeway several times a week. It’s the picture on the left, with the banner exclamation beneath: “Alta Vista Said ‘Yes’.” It’s an encounter that infuriates me.

There’s not much I can say about it that isn’t obvious. It’s a billboard placed where thousands of motorists will see it every day. It depicts a moment much manipulated in American consumer lore, the moment of purchasing a shiny new car. The smiling faces of the truck’s new owners are surely to be envied, for they have gained entrance into some rarified air.

Yet the billboard doesn’t advertise the car, or even the car’s dealer. It advertises the credit union that provided the financing for the car. And what the billboard wants us to know is that the credit union is a “Yes”-saying credit union. They are an institution that grants permission for ordinary men and women like these two to have the things they deserve. When others say “no,” Alta Vista says . . . you get the idea.

The problem, obviously, is that other credit unions probably said “no” for a good reason, and it probably has to do with the over-indebtedness of the average American. As the recent mortgage crisis demonstrates, lending institutions positively lick their lips at the opportunity to snag already over-debted  consumers and lock them into high interest rates and sub-prime schemes. But they said “Yes!”

I’m not sure why the encounter with this ad is so negative for me. Maybe it’s because I have anger over my own debt. Or maybe it’s because the ad is obviously targeting minorities in a low-income neighborhood. Or maybe it’s just the basic recognition that when a money-lending company spends money to advertise, what they’re offering can’t be good.

But they’re sure to snag a few suckers before they’re done.

Metric Madness

A story in today’s New York Times chronicles the difficulties faced by media companies in tracking online advertising. It seems that companies like Conde Nast, Viacom, and The New York Times itself are routinely finding that their estimates of how many people are viewing their advertising are higher than the estimates of independent groups like Nielson.

It’s an old problem, but one that the internet has aggravated.  Because if you can’t show an advertiser just how many sets of eyes will land on their precious pitch, then you can’t easily extract the cash from their hand. And without advertiser cash, these media companies are dead in the water.

Add to the mix the metrics of ad delivery companies (ala doubleclick.net), and you’ve potentially got three different sets of numbers, all purporting to be an “accurate” measurement of ad traffic for a given site.

There are a host of reasons for the discrepancies in counts, ranging from viewers who delete sites’ cookies from their browsers to problems counting people who view the same site from home and the office. Still, a publisher’s estimation of its own traffic, when shown to greatly exceed the estimate of ad delivery sites and independent trackers, has to look fishy.

Physician, Heal Thyself

The waiting room at the doctor’s office has long been fertile advertising ground. You can be sure that the dizzying array of magazine subscriptions is not just for your reading pleasure, but also for the delight of those magazines’ advertisers, who love nothing more than a captive audience.

But this morning, as my wife and I anxiously awaited our first appointment with our obstetrician, we experienced waiting room advertising in a whole new way, namely a television monitor. Now, tv’s are hardly new to the waiting room. But this was no ordinary tv. This was a flat-panel monitor mounted high on the wall and emlazoned with the brand logo, “Healthy Advice.”

Not only was the advice healthy (did you know that your heart is about the size of your fist and that you have a better chance of sticking to your fitness routine if your partner shares your goals?), but it was purely market-driven. Ads for foods and prescription drugs flashed continually across the screen, interspersed with the practice’s own ads for its cosmetic surgery services. We were pitched a pill for overactive bladder, some microderm abrasion, and a laxative yogurt–all in the space of half an hour.

The company behind it all is Healthy Advice Networks.

In what’s known by advertisers as “narrowcasting,” the network pitches products to a narrowly defined demographic (pregnant women waiting to see their OB.). A 2004 feature article in Cincinnati’s “Business Courier” described Healthy Advice Network’s strategy like this:

The idea behind the network is to provide digital screens that patients can read while waiting to see the doctor. Sprinkled between screens in a 25-minute loop are pharmaceutical advertisements, designed to get patients to ask their doctors for a particular drug.

The pharmaceutical drug pitch, “Ask your doctor about . . .” is a lot more effective when you’re only a few minutes from seeing your doctor face-to-face.

Add seeing the doctor to the already long list of activities now permeated with advertising messages.