As if marketing measurements weren’t complex enough, marketers are now using brain scans to determine the effectiveness of their ads....

]Yes, while still in its early development stage, neurological research is being tested as a new source of assessing the true “emotional impact” of advertising and marketing, beyond what individuals can recognize and articulate on their own. Armed with some general knowledge about which areas of the brain represent different forms of emotion, researchers wire up the participants and expose them to different ads to measure response.

So, is this brain scanning the wave of the future? Does this form of analysis unlock critical insight that marketers desperately need? Almost any additional insight into the performance of specific marketing initiatives can be helpful (although it may not justify the expense) so it is certainly worthy of consideration. Of course, here you have a complex technique that drills down deep into underlying emotions while many marketing organizations have yet to perfect the basic measurement methodologies that are available today.

The problem with this methodology is the many potential failure points that will make it difficult to take action and improve marketing impact. Marketing already has many brand measurements, however only a small percent of companies have actually established a predictive correlation to sales activity. Introducing new brainwave measurements would require advanced models to help translate how movement in an ad’s “empathy” score will ultimately leads to an influence on purchases, either now or in the future. And even modeling will be limited by the amount of quantitative data likely to be available. (How many people will actually agree to be wired for brain scans when it is getting increasingly difficult to get phone survey participation?)

Plus, when you are looking at brainwaves, you really have to consider the context of the ad exposure and the meaning to the recipient. Is my emotional response to an ad going to be influenced by how my day is going, how bad traffic was on my way home, or the type of program I’m watching on TV? Won’t my emotional response to actually using the product or service actually be more important in determining the lifetime value I’ll have with the company?

At best, it seems like neuron-marketing may be able to detect and diagnose those ads destined to fail to keep them from getting into the market. Of course, many of those ads lack good strategy and a focus on results so many other methods of analysis can probably be used to detect problems if only marketers made the investment of time and money to run such analysis.

Many companies certainly can benefit from better metrics and the marketing discipline should always be open to new measurement sources. Let’s just keep in mind that the most value will come from metrics that are highly actionable and contribute to improving marketing’s bottom line impact.