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.