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!
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.
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.
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.
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.