OTOinsights

NECN's Segment on Boston's Leading Neuromarketing Research Firms

For those of you who may have missed the NECN segment on how Innerscope Research and One to One Interactive's Quantemo Lab are using cutting edge Neuromarketing Research techniques to measure human emotional response to media, here it is:

Mass High Tech Highlights Boston's Leading Neuromarketing Research Firms

Today, Mass High Tech featured two of Boston's leading Neuromarketing Research Firm's in an article they published titled "Innerscope Research tests biometric response to Super Bowl Ads".  The article highlights how Innerscope Research and One to One Interactive's Quantemo Lab are using cutting edge Neuromarketing Research techniques to measure human emotional response to media.

NECN plans to review in tonight 6:30pm broadcast here in New England.  For those of you interested, tune in!

PermissionTV Reviews Latest OTOinsights Report on Viewer Engagement with Internet Video

We want to thank our friends at PermissionTV for their review of our latest OTOinsights report Titled "Emotion, Engagement, and Internet Video". The segment starts at 15:55 on the video time line. However, I would everyone to watch the whole session.

Viewer Engagement with Internet Video

OTOinsights  has released its third t=zero report, entitled ‘Emotion, Engagement and Internet Video,’ (available for free download: www.tzero-research.com). Using OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuromarketing measurement platform, the goal of the study was to study viewer engagement with internet video.

Analyzing the results from various physiological traces in combination with eye tracking and interview data, the t=zero research team presents a series of three insights with regards to how users engage with internet video. These include:

1. Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex.

2. Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings.

3. Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked.

The full report is available for free download at: http://www.tzero-research.com.

OTOinsight’s t=zero initiative looks to determine useful measures of user engagement and experience with digital and social media. Our third publication, focused on viewer engagement with internet video, is meant to objectively study the ways in which users locate, respond to, and engage with internet video. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see continued innovation in the online video space.

Bio Mapping - Creating Emotional Maps of Cities and Neighborhoods

Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops and consultations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighborhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualize points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualize the social space of a community.

Developed by Christian Nold, he aims to study how  perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states. 

One to One Interactive Makes a Splash at 2008 MITX Awards

One to One Interactive made a big splash at the 13th Annual MITX Awards on Wednesday night, with over seventy OTO'ers dominating seven tables at the show.

OTOi, a One to One Interactive company, scooped up two 2008 Awards for Comcast (out of a total of ten OTO nominations):

1) The Comcast Business Class Spring Promotion Campaign won the "Best Direct Response" category.
2) The Comcast Pandora Sponsorship won the "Best Use of Sponsorship category.

"We see this recognition as a testament to the incredible work we have been doing for Comcast over the past year; additionally, we are grateful to have received the highest number of nominations, ten overall, for the 2008 MITX Awards. It is encouraging to see that a lot of the work we are doing for our Fortune 1000 clients continues to get recognition for its best-in-class quality and execution," said Jeremi Karnell, Co-Founder and President of One to One Interactive.

You can read more on the details on each award here.

Additionally, the OTO marketing team, in a joint effort with Zugara, created an interactive video for this year's MITX Sports theme. The video invited the audience to determine the outcome of a football play between the "Conglomerate" agencies and the "Independent" agencies. Depending on the outcome of a live SMS (text messaging) poll, one of two scenarios were played... This type of interactive video was a MITX first, and it was a huge hit with the crowd.

...And on Wednesday night, the people had definitively spoken: the Independents won the vote, outmaneuvering and vanquishing the sluggish conglomerates!

 

We will put up a link to the video shortly, so that you can test it out for yourself...

All-in-all, it was a terrific show. We're all looking forward to next year's MITX Award show.

OTOinsight's Releases Study on "Player Engagement and In-Game Advertising"

OTOinsights has released the second t=zero report entitled “Player Engagement and In-Game Advertising.”

You can download the full report free of charge here.

Excerpt:

Analyzing the results from three separate physical traces in combination with eye tracking and interview data, the team of Indiana University School of Informatic's researchers led by Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D., Jeffrey Bardzell, PH.D., and Tyler Pace, present a series of five insights for the design and dissemination of future in-game advertising:

   1. More recent ads are more readily remembered.
   2. Highly visible placement compensates for low brand knowledge.
   3. Brand knowledge compensates for low ad visibility.
   4. Engagement and brand recognition are positively linked.
   5. Context-appropriate ads build positive brand associations.

Full Report

Jeremi Karnell, Co-Founder and President of One to One Interactive, t=zero's parent company stated:

"Our second publication, focused on Player Engagement and In-Game Advertising, is meant to objectively measure the effectiveness of the various tactics major brands utilize in creating advertising for use in video games. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see continued innovation in that space."

OTOinsight's t=zero will finish the year with a series of reports focused on measuring emotion response to digital video.

Engagement with Political Viral Videos

With the United States Presidential election just over a month away, the airwaves of television and the tubes of the Internet are full of messages from the candidates. Luckily for them, these messages are being received, as there seems to be wide-spread interest in this particular election. Marketingvox has a nice recap of the viewership numbers from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. McCain may have had 500,000 more television viewers than Obama during the convention, but how did he fare on the Internet?

Not as well, it would seem. Visible Measures collected data on viral video views just after the conventions and had some interesting, but unsurprising results. As of September 8, 2008, Obama had 1.3 million more views than McCain. Unsurprising, because there is no doubt that social media tends to leans towards the left. Jeremiah Owyang, an Analyst at Forrester, conducted a small survey that highlights this phenomenon (also check out Josh Bernoff’s post on the matter).

In his post, Owyang states that “frequency [of viewing videos] isn’t telling… sentiment is.” Here at OTOinsights, we whole-heartedly share this opinion. The core application of Quantemo is to measure a person’s emotional reaction with media.  As such, we decided to throw on our political hats and conducted an experiment to see how engaged people are with political advertisements.

Thirty participants were shown nine videos on YouTube. These included a music video, a smear ad, and a regular ad from Obama, McCain, and a neutral ‘control’:

	McCain	Obama	Neutral
Music	Raisin' McCain	Yes We Can	Where  is Matt?
Ad	Global	Hands	Airbook
Smear Ad	Taxman	Seven	Lenovo

As with social media, the participants were either moderates or liberals (93%) who planned on voting for Obama (63%). Even though most of the sample was in Obama’s court, we had some interesting findings.

The Quantemo Engagement Index (QEI) is OTOinsights’ proprietary index to determine users’ engagement with media.  In short, it is a combination of the users’ opinions of the aesthetics of the media, their emotional reaction, and their physiological reaction.  The QEI results for the political viral video study can be found below:

It was not surprising to find that the McCain videos had the lowest engagement scores. But it is interesting to note how the QEI continually drops as we progress from a neutral music video to an ad with malicious intent. This trend occurred with both candidates and the ‘control’. Additionally, we found that no smear ad elicited a positive response.  Perhaps smear ads are not the best way to engage one’s constituency.

What makes an Internet video viral is its ability to highly engage the individual so that he wants to share it with his friends. These music videos seem to have engaged the participants more than either of the advertisements did (when comparing McCain to McCain, and so forth). We asked the study participants whether they would send the video to a friend, and again, the music videos would have been sent more than the ads, as shown below:

So, in summary, it would seem that not only are the music videos more engaging to people, but they have a better chance of getting sent a friend. Additionally, since social media tends to skew to the left, one would expect more of Obama’s videos to get sent around the world, and this is definitely the case. You can keep track of the current numbers over at techPresident. As of September 25, Obama had 51.5 million more YouTube views than McCain. That’s a pretty telling figure. A word of advice for McCain: if you want to engage more users on the Internet, it may be time to create more viral videos that users will want to send to their friends.

In the near future, we will be compiling the full results of the study and will make them available here on the OTOinsights blog.  If you would like more information about the study, OTOinsights, or Quantemo, please be sure to contact us.

OTOinsight's "Corporate vs. Amateur Efforts in Second Life" Study Timely in Relation to Google's Launch of "Lively"

 

OTOinsights has  just released the first t=zero report entitled “Serious Games for Marketing: Learnings from Corporate and Amateur Efforts in Second Life.”

You can download the full report free of charge here. 

The team of Indiana University School of Informatic's researchers led by Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D., Jeffrey Bardzell, PH.D., and Tyler Pace,released findings that compare player engagement in some of Second Life's most successful user-generated areas compared to some of the more ambitious corporate-sponsored efforts in Second Life.

Jeremi Karnell, Co-Founder and President of One to One Interactive, t=zero's parent company states:

"Our first publication, focused on Serious Games for Marketing, is meant to take a step back and objectively evaluate what worked and did not work in the rush to establish early footholds in Virtual World spaces. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see new entrants and innovations in that space, such as what we are seeing with Google's Lively and others."

ClickZ has picked it up here.

AdverLab picked it up here.

Future reports will focus on Online Games, Social Networks, and Amateur Multimedia.  Included will be insights gleaned from our Neuromarketing research group, Quantemo.

 

Evaluating User Experiences in Games: Workshop at CHI 2008

On April 5th, members of OTOinsights t=zero partnership with the Indiana University School of Informatics participated in a workshop on “Evaluating User Experience in Games” hosted by the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) conference in Florence, Italy. CHI is the largest and most prestigious conference in human-computer interaction (HCI), with over 2,000 participants from dozens of countries.

At the workshop, we presented and discussed our plans for executing a multi-modal evaluation of game play experience. Following presentations from the other workshop participants, we participated in a substantive discussion about the current state of game play experience research and practice. The remainder of this post is dedicated to some of the insights from that discussion and a reflection on how the t=zero team’s work is reflective of the latest changes to player experience evaluation methods.

A major theme from the workshop centered on the difficulty or need to distinguish immersion from engagement and determining the effects of each on player experience. Some workshop participants interchanged the terms immersion and engagement in reference to a singular concept; however, other participants saw immersion and engagement as distinct forces. To some, immersion is simply the extent to which a person prefaces the current media over other information (playing a game and not hearing someone yell for you) while engagement is something beyond immersion that fully brings a player into the game world. Participants concluded that we should establish a shared understanding of where immersion and engagement begin and end and to what extent each of those concepts (or a unified concept) affects the game play experience. Without such an understanding, valid and useful measures for evaluating player experience with games will be difficult to develop.

Numerous methods used for evaluating experience with digital media are in use. For example, with the assistance of Quantemo, we simultaneously measure 5 or more biophysical modalities and combine that information with additional behavioral research methods. One identified weakness in all of those methods is a reliance on an expert’s interpretation of the results. Researchers are crucial to the process of evaluating player experience, but in some situations players themselves are best equipped to interpret results generated from our work. Who, then, is the “expert” that interprets the data? A great example from the workshop came from the use of eye tracking equipment in the usability test of a video game. Eye tracking equipment readily shows a researcher “what” a player is looking at, but cannot as easily address “why” a player is looking at an object. Showing eye tracking footage to players and asking why their visual patterns change at any given moment may reveal meaningful information that even expert researchers cannot see.

The final issue brought up during the workshop concerns the difficulty of interpreting biophysical signals as a measure of player experience. Researchers at the workshop commented on the difficulties of relying on any individual biophysical measure to measure changes in experience. Individual measures, especially galvanic skin response, can be susceptible to even subtle changes in a research environment and may not accurately or entirely reflect a players experience with a game due to the noise added to the data by other stimuli (air temperature, background noise, etc). The multi-modal method that our Quantemo lab uses for player experience evaluation was judged by participants to be a promising example of how to compensate for the shortcomings of individual biophysical measures. Monitoring multiple biophysical signals and supplementing those measurements with traditional, vetted behavioral research methods yields results that can be viewed with increased confidence by stakeholders and researchers alike.

The t=zero team was extremely happy to have the opportunity to participate in the workshop and share our experiences with peers from around the world. Methods for evaluating experience with digital media are growing and changing at a rapid pace and events like this workshop help all of us to understand the mutual challenges that we face as a field. While we are currently focused on creating a shared understanding of our terminology, leveraging research participants as knowledge co-creators and developing robust and reliable methods for evaluating experience, you never know what the next challenge will be. Participating in this workshop gives us confidence that t=zero is well positioned to tackle the current and upcoming challenges created by the ever-changing digital landscape.

Tyler Pace, Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D., Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.