February 19, 2009

Taking a brand-aid approach
to public service advertising

A Yale student has started a neuromarketing company to study the effects of product branding on the brain. The aim is to develop better advertisements for promoting healthy behavior.

Psychology major Emily Yudofsky is conducting research aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of public-service advertisements that promote healthy behaviors.

Despite its known health risks, approximately 1.1 billion people smoke tobacco worldwide. Cigarette manufacturers spend more than $8 billion annually on product promotion. But what if advertisements could be neurologically targeted to influence people to stop smoking and reverse other harmful habits?

For Emily Yudofsky, the idea of using neuromarketing techniques to influence behavior for the better is more than just a dream. A Yale College junior majoring in psychology, Yudofsky in 2007 established her own “neuromarketing” company, Applied Resonance Research, with the goal of using imaging technologies to study the effects of advertising and other marketing strategies on brain activity. Now, with funding from the Yale Interdisciplinary Research Consortium on Stress, Self-Control and Addiction (IRCSSA), Yudovsky is using the medical school’s functional MRI (fMRI) facility to study reactions in the brain to various advertisements.

While still in high school, in Houston, Texas, Yudofsky attended neuroimaging conferences and got a summer job working with a team of neuroscientists and behavioral scientists who were examining brain activity and personality disorders at Baylor College of Medicine’s Brown Foundation Human Neuroimaging Laboratory. Another study taking place in the lab at that time, the results of which were published in the journal Neuron in 2004, reported that subjects’ preference for a popular soft drink increased when drunk from cups bearing the drink’s logo, and that certain brain regions—especially the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making, and the hippocampus, which regulates memory—were more stimulated when a sip of the drink in the fMRI scanner was accompanied by a visual presentation of the drink’s brand.

The study “showed that branding alone can change the way people make decisions,” Yudofsky says. This work got her thinking about the possibility of studying neural responses to marketing with the aim of being able to counter harmful behaviors through specially designed public service advertisements.

As a Yale freshman, Yudofsky was invited by the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI) to be one of 12 participants in the YEI’s inaugural summer fellowship program. She was mentored by Hilary Blumberg, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and diagnostic radiology, and Rajita Sinha, PH.D., professor of psychiatry and IRCSSA director. Sinha helped Yudofsky get grant money to conduct fMRI research at the Anlyan Center for Medical Research and Education on the effects of public-service ads aimed at preventing obesity.

While subjects’ brain activity was measured, they were asked “to make a decision between two different objects or food items, and they’re told to think about the consequences of their choices,” Yudofsky explains. “Again asked to make decisions between two different items—some of the choices are healthful and some are unhealthful.”

By applying imaging technologies to similar psychological tasks, Yudofsky hopes to determine how the brain reacts to public service announcements and how such announcements and similar forms of communication influence choices and behaviors. Yudofsky and her work were the subject of a recent New York Times profile.

Her ultimate goal, she says, is “to improve public health and diminish human suffering.”

—Charles Gershman

Photo by Michael Marsland

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