I have no doubt after reading the article entitled “The advertising effect – how do we get the balance of advertising right?” published today by Compass by Zoe Gannon and Neal Lawson that the major thesis of the authors that unregulated advertising is likely to be dangerous for society, and could have a massively detrimental effect.

I really liked this article, as I think that it is one of the few articles which seemed to have an understanding of the modern neuroscience involved in tackling a problem of huge cultural significance, maybe using legal measures. As someone who tends to read the introduction and conclusion of article, I found it most helpful that Gannon and Lawson summarized the gist of their argument successfully in the conclusion,

“If you go to an advertising company to sell a product or service their planners will strip the issue down to bare essentials before building a campaign around it. It is the essence of the message they are after, the essence of the advertising industry is that new technologies, new science and new psychology have put the industry increasingly out of social and political control. Advertising regulations now need to catch up with the reality of the advertising effect on us and our planet.”

On the other hand, I found Jackie Ashley’s response lacked any depth to an analysis of the problem from either a neuroscience or legal perspective (1). However, arguably, one of the most interesting enticing paragraphs begins with the sentence,

“Meanwhile neurologists are working out what images will trigger the buy button in our brains.”

Gannon and Lawson provide that “machines are being used to shed light on brain mechanisms that play a central role in consumer behaviour: circuits that underlie reward, decision making, motivation, emotions and the senses of self.” This would indeed seem to make sense, as the subjective experience of being the target of advertising probably has the same underlying neural basis as our euphoria on sex or drugs of abuse. Indeed, one of the many successes of neurological research in the last century has been to identy a neurobiological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed “rewards” and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behaviour, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is now universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.

In addition, the authors give due credit to one of the most important papers on the subject of “neuromarketing”, a relatively new field. A cognitive neuroscientist (Read Montague) postulated that, if people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn’t. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn’t particularly like. Neuromarketing is effectively the study of the brain’s responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape.

Montague had his subjects take the “Pepsi Challenge” while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too.

Coke “lit up” the medial prefrontal cortex (a part of the brain very much involved in higher cognitive processes). Montague’s hypothesis was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers’ choices. The paper was a substantial contribution to the literature. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a new field of the neurosciences was born: neuromarketing. (1)

However, there are still some problematic unanswered questions from a neuroethics perspective.

(1) What effect did the Coke label have on the brain that the Pepsi label did not?

(2) What other evidence suggests that taste alone does not determine your favorite cola? Obesity is epidemic in America, and sugared soft drinks are one of the primary culprits.

(3) How might this research help doctors fight obesity?

(4) Suppose both the Coke and the Pepsi labels triggered the same reaction in the brain. What conclusion would you draw?

For a long time, marketing experts have relied on behavioral studies for guidance. In the USA, some companies are taking the practice several steps further, commissioning their own fMRI studies consistent with the research above. For example, in a study of men’s reactions to cars, Daimler-Chrysler has found that sportier models activate the brain’s reward centres as well as activating the area in the brain that recognizes faces, which may explain people’s tendency to anthropomorphize their cars. Steven Quartz, a scientist at Stanford University, is currently conducting similar research on movie trailers. And in the age of poll-taking and smear campaigns, political advertising is also getting in on the game. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have found that Republicans and Democrats react differently to campaign ads showing images of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Those ads cause the part of the brain associated with fear to light up more vividly in Democrats than in Republicans.

Gannon and Lawson in their scholarly article appear to develop their case that, if unregulated, this is dangerous:

“Excessive advertising turns a never ending series of new needs into new wants, and crowds out the space for other visions of the good society, where time and relationships matter more than what we buy. Advertising encourages us to run ever faster on the treadmill of modern consumer life; in so doing it contributes to growing consumer debt, a number of social problems which this report discusses, and to the very real prospect of climate change beyond our ability to manage. So the report calls for a tax on all advertising that encourages greater consumption to limit its scope and slow the pace of growth for the good of society and the future of the planet.”

There are in fact seven ways which Gannon and Lawson perceive as perhaps being capable of solving the problem: e.g. banning advertising in public spaces, controling advertising on the Internet, tax advertising, and probably, most contentiously, introduce statutory regulation of the advertising industry. This would be yet another example of where cognitive neuroscience meets the law in some way – exciting times indeed. If advertising is so rampant, should we spend money researching it like cancer?

References

(1) Jackie Ashley. Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery. The Guardian, Sunday 24th February 2009.

(2) McGlure SM, Li, J, Tomlin, D, Cypert KS, Montague LM, Montague PR.  Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron 2004 Oct 14;44(2):379-87.