 Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to day one of our digital marketing conference. We've something a little bit special for you over the next two days, as this is the first time we've run our popular digital marketing conference as an online event. We do hope that you'll find it interesting and able to take away some valuable insights and handy tips from our guest speakers. The conference is split into two hour sessions across today and tomorrow, and we're brought together a special selection of our most popular guest speakers. Today we'll be hearing from Hannah Bule, Senior Research and Measurement Manager at the Internet Advertising Bureau and new marketing specialist Katie Hart. And then there's me, Phillip Preston, and I'll be your host over the two days. So without further ado, I'd now like to hand over to our first guest speaker, Hannah Bule, from the Internet Advertising Bureau. Over to you Hannah. Thank you so much. Hello everyone, thank you so much for attending this morning. So just before we look at the landscape for digital advertising, I'll just tell you a tiny bit about who we are, the Internet Advertising Bureau for anyone who doesn't know. So we're a not-for-profit industry body for digital advertising, and we're committed to building a sustainable future for digital advertising. And we do this by bringing the industry together through our 1,200 members, including media owners, agencies and brands. And we do this through a range of activities, events and training and research, as well as setting standards and helping the industry to remain self-regulated. And you can access everything that I talk about on our site, just to mention that membership and our content is free for advertisers. So as I'm from the research and measurement team, I'll be showing you a selection of different research projects and hopefully giving you some insights. So this is what I'm going to be talking about over the next 25 minutes or so. So we're going to look at digital advertising from three different angles. Firstly, a very top-line look at the digital advertising landscape via the IAB and PWC ad spend study. And secondly, using insights from a large consumer piece of research that we did last year will look at how digital habits have changed since 2015. The impact of the pandemic on consumer digital behaviours and most importantly, try to provide guidance on how to reach consumers effectively via digital advertising. So lastly, let's have a look at the challenges faced by advertisers when it comes to digital and I can provide some resources for helping to tackle the biggest issues. Okay, so let's have a look at the digital advertising landscape. So as I mentioned, we measure this via our joint PWC and IAB digital ad spend study. And to give you a bit of background, it's been running since 1997 and we work with PWC and the industry to collect revenue data. So these figures are used by the AA and WALK as the official measure for digital advertising in the UK. So here is the headline figure for 2020, which is the last four-year data that we released. When we look at how digital advertising did in 2020, it reached 16.5 billion and over the last few years, digital media has made itself the largest media in the UK in terms of its share. But even this wasn't immune to the economic downturn from the pandemic. And behind the total figure, what we actually see with the 5% year-on-year growth is the slowest year-on-year growth rate that we've seen for over a decade. And the last time we saw single-digit growth was back in 2009 during the financial crash. And then to look at how the first year of 2021 was compared to the first half of 2020, we saw recovered growth. And with confidence returning to the UK economy, things dramatically changed and we saw the biggest ever half-year growth compared to the year before. So if you look at the growth rates on this slide, you can see that digital ads spend grew by 49% if you compare it to H1 2020. However, if you compare it back to the first half of 2019, it shows the growth rate of 42%. So this is amazing growth compared to pre-lockdown levels. And the drivers behind this included things like big e-commerce boosts like Amazon Prime Day and there was a lot of things starting up with sports such as the Euros, the Tour de France, Wimbledon and the FA Cup. There was the vaccine rollout and the easing of lockdown and a general feeling of returning to normal. So the next act to spend figures for 4 year 2021 will be out at the end of April. And group and forecast digital advertising will be up by nearly 40% in 2021 compared to 2020. And I believe all media are expected to report good recovery that year as well as digital. So hand in hand with increased ad spend levels, we see the popularity of digital with consumers. And it's this appetite for digital content and number of potential eyeballs to reach that is the real driving factor in the spending digital. So let's have a look at how people use digital and how advertisers might best communicate with them based on these insights. We'll do this via a piece of IB research called Real Living. And Real Living was a study to deep dive into digital media consumption and it looked at popular consumer areas like gaming, connected TV, audio and e-commerce. So we first did this study back in 2015, so we're able to look back at long term changes. And as consumers are constantly evolving and adapting in their interactions with the digital world, we have revisited it during 2021. And one of the key aims was to understand how consumers digital lives have changed and what our digital lives look like now. And of course 2021 would have been a more digitally complex place for consumers anyway, but we can't hide from the fact that COVID put a huge spin on things. And we'll look at some top-line insights now and there's a full report on our site with more detail, plus an in-depth look at the areas as I mentioned. So if you're interested, please do have a look. So just briefly on the methodology, so our approach allowed us to look at things at the broad quantitative level, but also at the very granular qualitative level, which we feel is essential for this type of research. We did the research in conjunction with Sparkler and part one was a large quant study of 2,000 representative consumers with specific deep dives into e-commerce, gaming, audio, connected TV, as well as questioning around the impact of COVID on behavior. Part two was a qualitative study of 27 people over five days, and it's centered on a media diary where participants outlines their daily digital behaviors and the attitudes underpinning them, as well as their interactions with and feelings towards digital advertising. In addition, the Quoll cohort were passively tracked over two of their devices so that we could see in real time what they were actually doing across the digital day. And this second stage has given us some rich insights into how consumer attitudes and understanding have really changed. Okay, so let's start with theme one and the idea that we're constantly connected digitally, and this creates endless opportunity for advertisers to engage. Okay, so to start with, I'll show you a couple of interesting charts. So back in 2015, we tracked people's real-time online media usage throughout the day, and you can see the pattern in the top green chart. Well, we repeated this exercise in 2021 and the results are quite dramatic. So in 2015, our digital day started pre-commute but slowly, and there was a drop-off in activity after mid-morning, followed by a second early evening peak. And at the time, this was a distinctive pattern. So compare that to 2021, morning activity increases later, perhaps driven by COVID and the change of lifestyle that brought, but dramatically. And it stays high across the whole day. So downtime is only really between midnight and 6am. So what this says to brands is that there's an opportunity to engage with someone somewhere at almost all times. But it's not just that we're spending loads more time on our phones, although I'm sure we're all a bit guilty of that. The study showed that on average, we use five devices a day. So not only is the volume of digital higher, but we're doing it at the same time. And with people spending more time at home last year, you can expect that more things are done quickly. And this chart shows claims increase in usage across 13 digital media activities since COVID. And not surprisingly, advertisers have more opportunities to engage with consumers than ever before. And brands who are considering newer formats should be looking at their strategies now, as there are new consumers in this space. There's a lot of claim growth in a range of potential formats from video, music, social and gaming to e-commerce, as you can see in this chart. And in our deep lives into online shopping, we've seen mainstream audiences flock to e-commerce. And our real living showed that women are significantly more likely overall to be gaming than men. So are these changes here to stay? And are these things, these new behaviors actually permanent? And the truth is, it's too early to tell. I imagine that people will continue to adopt the changes that have made their lives easier or better, such as online grocery shopping, a new love of gaming, or perhaps online news, or attending meetings online. So just to throw another potential spanner in the works. In our research, we did see that two in five people say that once COVID is over, I'll be desperate to spend less time using screens, suggesting some kind of overstimulation from screen time. And there's definitely a need for some screen downtime. And this was highest for 16 to 34 year olds, where 59% of them agreed with this statement. So what can we take out from this? So the COVID effect on device usage is still evolving and brands must ensure they do not assume behaviors over the last 18 months are permanent. So consumers aren't quite settled on a new normal yet, which means there is still an opportunity to help shape this. And research will be more important than ever to follow and learn from evolving online journeys. So while the pandemic has led to consumers spending more time with online devices than ever before, now is also a great opportunity to build in new channels like online audio to media plans as people seek a break from screens. So on to theme two. So we just saw that we're all online more than we were seven years ago. However, the opportunity to reach people is short. So this is where we turn theme one on its head. And just because we're doing a lot more doesn't mean we're absorbed for hours and hours and have high attention span for some killer advertising. As we mentioned earlier, we tracked our qualitative respondents for two weeks. And in reality, the average dwell time per individual session that we observed was pretty short. So it was 24 seconds on web browsers and 109 seconds on apps. So for advertisers, it actually presents only a short timeframe in which to capture consumers imaginations. We've known the opportunity is brief, but in 2021 when we're doing so much online, this is so important to remember. This means that understanding the key moments that matter come back into focus. And this chart shows usage patterns from our passive tracking for audio and gaming. So I think a number of years ago, gaming and digital audio would have been considered niche, but now they're very much popular mainstream activities. You can see the peaks at different times during the day. Very clear peaks for gaming at breakfast and lunchtime and then a saw in audio after 10pm. So what great hooks throughout the day and when consumers might only be using the device for a short time. So this sort of data helps you plan effectively. There are more examples of this in our full report. So the point is, look at how neatly an advertiser could cross promote across different digital media. Understanding when these peaks are is key to targeting consumers. But most importantly, engagement mindsets become even more useful to understand with consumers using more digital media and devices than ever. So in addition to understanding usage patterns and finding out when we use different digital media. The next ingredient to effectively advertising is to understand a different mindset depending on what we are doing. So Real Living looks at 13 different digital media activities from using a search engine all the way through to gaming on a console. So by analyzing consumers energy levels and reactions to advertising, we have new guides that allow advertisers to understand all digital activities. So grouped into three different engagement states, which you can see in this Venn diagram. Advertisers will be able to use this framework when planning their campaigns to understand where the consumer's mind is during the key media moments and the advertising strategies they should follow. So this is probably best explained using a specific example, which I shall do on the next slide. So here we're looking at gaming, which is a highly immersive environment. So other immersive environments includes podcasts, watching for example. And it takes a lot of your focus and tends to be done in decent times sessions. A lot of effort and attention is put in and the player is highly invested is a very committed online state. So in this environment, how should a marketer try to reach them? So I'd say with great care and respect. So firstly, try to make the ad in the same genre as the game and try to make sure it adds to the experience visually and doesn't look out of place. As with many other ads, frequency capping is crucial. Advertising needs to blend well with this, be sympathetic and not upset the immersive experience, but add to it. Recommend related products and take them on an advertising journey to match their environment. So if you tread carefully in this immersive environment, it is a massive opportunity to reach a consumer and get your message across. So and lastly, and I think really one of the most interesting things we found from real living is that our consumer understanding of digital advertising. It has increased in 2021. So with that comes new expectations of the online ad experience with key learnings for advertisers. So we know the majority of consumers accept that advertising is a fair exchange for getting online services for free. Our quant survey revealed that 61% of all consumers agreed, which was pretty stable across demographics. But it's much more than this. Our quoll research revealed a level of sophistication in their understanding that extended to the mechanisms of digital advertising and how their actions can have an impact on business outcomes. So these are just two of the quotes from the report, but they clearly highlight the point. Consumers are starting to understand more about things like sponsored ads. And here one lady told us she even goes on to Etsy to click on the ad specifically to help small businesses. These are savvy customers. And as we do more and more online, our understanding builds. So consumer understand that across lots of digital services, free content must involve some advertising. And they were using words such as freemium and funding throughout the quoll research when they were talking to us in their own language to describe the exchange, which shows quite a good grasp of understanding about the value exchange. So we know consumers are more savvy in understanding about advertising. And this means we need to get advertising right in order to be effective rather than annoying. So this can be done by following best practice and these do's and don'ts of digital marketing, which were articulated in our research. So thinking about what consumers want from their online ad experience. Well, firstly, as with any advertising, it needs to add some value to their journey. So this could take the form of aiding discovery of a new relevant product. For example, telling them new information about things like flights with resuming to different countries at different times, or being fun or entertaining, or it could reward them in some way. So things like with a game or by telling them about a discount that they might not have known about. And our final suggestion in our list of do's is to make sure the advertising is transparent about the personal context of the consumers online journey. So advertising that consumers clearly understand is based on their personal context makes them feel much more positive. Whether that's relevance, their current needs and search history, such as showing suggestions for current DIY project or food delivery ad at the right point in the evening, or perhaps sponsored content, which is transparent and based on consumer interest. Obviously there's a line here and not to be too creepy or to stalk the consumer. So in addition to adding value, consumers also want agency and control. So agency in that they feel they have played an active role in what they see and control in that they can choose what they see and trust that the advertiser respects that choice. So what don't they want? There are three themes here too. Firstly, don't forget to build in frequency caps, both in number of ads and the length of ads. We heard consistently from consumers that shorter adverts were preferable and it tipped over into a negative experience if too many ads were shown in place of the content that they were trying to consume. Secondly, don't forget to allow the consumer to skip or dismiss an advert if they have the chance. We know this is very helpful tool for consumers and they get frustrated if they don't have this level of control. And lastly, and not something that is new to brands but is still something consumers mentioned in this research, don't invade the creative space. So discretion and respect for the environment consumers are in is so important in the consumer advertiser contract. And when this is not respected by takeovers or too much coverage, consumers lose trust in the advertising. So hopefully these tips help with understanding how to communicate in the right way and generally apply across most digital formats. Let's explore how advertisers feel about some of the challenges that pose itself to digital advertising. As well as highlighting these challenges, I'll point to some resources that can help to navigate some of these issues. In order to understand this, we undertook a survey of advertisers in 2021 and 63 companies answered. So as you can see from this chart, the top challenge was, which is at the bottom, measuring effectiveness. And this will probably be a presentation all in itself, but I think it's worth sharing some of the top things that the IAB have done in this particular space and the resources that you can access if you want to. So firstly, we produced the measurement guide and toolkit, which we developed with MTM. So the aim was to demystify digital measurement and to educate individuals seeking to progress their knowledge and to consolidate current best practice around measuring digital effectiveness within the context of other media. So this guide explores the different methods of evaluating effectiveness from brand studies, econometrics through to attribution. And it helps you pull together a measurement strategy and to think about selecting metrics based on objectives. So one of the benefits of digital is the wealth of data available. However, the challenge can be knowing which aspects are the most important to hopefully this guide will give you some help with this thought process. The second measurement initiative I wanted to highlight is something we call National Anti-Click Through Rate Day. So the aim of this was to ask the industry to think carefully about how they measure digital and combat the overuse of click-through rates. So why are they an issue? They're still widely reported and sometimes used as a default. Click-through rates aren't an accurate measure of success as they don't give the full picture about campaign effectiveness. And it really focuses on the short term, which isn't very helpful when you're trying to measure a brand building campaign. So this campaign is to really raise awareness of the failings of click-through rates amongst people who use them kind of as a default. So it returns for the fourth time on the 14th of February. So a very romantic campaign from us on not using click-through rates. And we'll once again be using a PR and content campaign to raise awareness of the perils of relying on clicks. An issue that I think was fair to say hasn't gone away. So please keep an eye out for this. And if there's anyone in your business who might rely on click-through rates to assess a digital campaign, and perhaps some of this content might be useful to share with them. And finally, another key area of focus when it comes to measurement is the work we're doing with attention over the next year. So we know that attention is an area of increasing interest for advertisers. And it can be confusing to have many different definitions in the market. So advertisers need clarity on what attention means and how they can use these metrics. So by sharing, remember, knowledge, expertise and opinions, IAB UK aims to create a guide to attention by the end of the first half of this year. And we'll be taking several steps such as a knowledge share forum to make sure we're looking at all the work that has been done in this area up until now. And off the back of that, we are hoping to create a handbook for advertisers to understand the different definitions of attention in 2022. Okay, so just to summarise and recap on some of the things I've shown you. So from an industry landscape perspective, we saw ad spend slowed down during 2020 to 5% year on year growth. And that recovered and accelerated for the first half of 2021. From a consumer perspective, we observed that usage of digital rocketed during the pandemic, but being aware of the mindset and usage pattern for different formats, because consumers are more savvy in their understanding of advertising and because of this, make sure that advertising adds value and that people have control over it. And finally, from the advertiser perspective, we saw that measuring effectiveness is considered the biggest challenge with digital advertising. And the measurement toolkit can help demystify and to create a measurement strategy for anyone that might want to have a look at that. And selecting the right metrics to evaluate your campaign and not necessarily just reaching for click through rates is key to showing the brand building impact of digital advertising. So thank you everyone for listening. There's my contact details if anyone has any thoughts after this session. And that's it from me. Okay, that was brilliant. Thank you very much, Hannah. Great presentation. We'll be hearing from our second guest speaker, Katie Hart shortly. But for that, we're going to have a quick Q&A session for any questions you might have for Hannah. We've already got some questions to get us underway, which is great, which I'll get to in a second. But please do continue to post your questions in the questions tab and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 10 to 15 minutes or so. Okay, Hannah, this first question relates to an early part of your presentation. Can you clarify what you mean by audio in the first part of the presentation? Yeah, sure. So when I'm talking about digital audio, I may not have said the word digital before it, it's really live streaming via the Internet and things like podcasts. Okay, great. So the second question is what findings from the research would you say are particularly relevant to B2B marketing? I'm sure quite a few B2B marketers on the webinar today. Sure. That's a really good question. I think following the principles that I set out of getting advertisers advertising right would apply to B2B advertising. Because at the end of the day, even though we're marketers, we're still consumers, we're still people. So following the basic guidelines of making sure advertising adds value tells someone new information that they didn't already know or offers some kind of discount on your product. For example, all of those principles still apply, as well as the kind of deep understanding of the value exchange that you are consuming the content for free in exchange for kind of eyeballs on your advertising in effect. And I guess with the kind of working from home lifestyle that a lot of us have at the moment, we're always online, there's always an opportunity to reach your customers more so than probably ever before when we're all in offices. Okay, great. Thank you. So the next question, a lot of these results aren't surprising given the bigger proportion of time spent at home in 2021 due to lockdowns and work from home. Are there any results which really surprised you or you were unexpected or odds with trends? For me, I think firstly just on the point about it wasn't surprising that we were all online a lot more. I think that what really happened was that this time accelerated some of the changes. So for example, there wasn't as much kind of new live TV, for example, so people were discovering things like on demand video. So people of different generations who might not have been as into it before we use it like for example, my dad would be watching BBC iPlayer to get his content. So I think it's been a kind of time for people to discover things they wouldn't normally do. So online shopping is another great example of that. So I might have gone off on a tangent, but I think the thing that I find really interesting is just the volume of time that we are online and I don't think that's necessarily going to go away. I suppose one of the things that was quite surprising was that consumers say, we turn to things like digital audio because sometimes we do need a break from screens. So it's to really appreciate that and to understand that these are great channels, even though they're not necessarily in front of the screen, to reach consumers in a different mindset. So it's a different opportunity to talk to them. OK, so are you tracking people's use of screen time post-pandemic when things get back to normal? I guess you'll be able to see what the whole thing might evolve. Yeah, so the study itself is not kind of ongoing because that would be tremendously expensive. However, you have things like UCOM and Ipsos that run online measurements of the activities that people are doing online. That will provide some great data and is actually on my to-do list to kind of explore how time spent online has kind of changed to where we are now. But with the kind of going into lockdowns and working from home and then going back into the office, I don't think it's quite settled yet. So we're not going to see the true impact quite yet until we kind of settle into a rhythm that sticks around for a bit longer. OK, great. So next question, is there any research on which calls to action work well for customers and how that changed with the pandemic? No, we haven't necessarily specifically done that. It does sound like a very interesting thing to see whether it has changed. But unfortunately, we haven't done that at the IEB. OK, next, given the incredibly brief dwell times for users and their dislike of intrusion, is there not an argument for broader awareness campaigns as opposed to specific targeted campaigns based around the peaks in usage? Yeah, I think there is a role for both. So just to explore the objectives of what you're doing on each channel and whether you're looking for the broader awareness or the more targeted hits. So there's definitely a role for both. OK, would you have any impact on the effect of Apple's move against Facebook tracking? Would I have it? So at the IEB, we continue to kind of monitor the changes. So I don't personally know that, but if you keep an eye on the news articles on our site, if we do have anything on that subject, it would be on there. OK, there's one or two questions around click through rates. So let's have a look. What are some of the more effective metrics instead of click through rates? So unfortunately, there isn't one kind of silver bullet to answer this. And so as I mentioned before, you need to look at the objectives of the campaign and match the KPIs and the metrics to the objectives. And you can have a look at the measurement toolkit guide that we wrote with this. So depending on what the campaign is aiming to achieve, things like time spent metrics like dwell time are really useful or attention metrics to show whether the audience took notice and had some kind of impact and meaning and things like interaction rates such as comments on social, for example, and the sentiment behind them. And then there's always a role for branding metrics based on objectives as well, such as things like likelihood to to recommend. But it's important not just to focus on really short term metrics and try and make sure you address the long term brand building ones as well. So sorry, that's kind of a short answer because it depends what what you're trying to achieve with the campaign as to which metrics you should be selecting. Okay, great. You spoke of eyeballs. Is there some research you can point to that looks at what eyeballs actually see and take in the adverts rather than missing the ad together? I guess Katie Hart's going to cover this to some extent. But Anna, have you got any thoughts about that? Yeah, so I think anything to do with eye tracking studies. So attention studies, I know that Katie will be looking at this in more detail. So I'm going to leave that for her presentation. But just generally, I'd have a look at the work of Lumen. They do a fair amount in eye tracking, for example. Okay. Was increased savviness from consumers consistent across all demographics? Yes, I suppose the baseline was different for different groups of consumers. So I think I don't want to kind of sound funny that the very older generations in when I've done research in the past may not have had much understanding. But this time they were showing a lot more savviness and understanding of how advertising works. But towards the younger end of the scale, I suppose the youngest and the sort of 16 to 24 year olds, they didn't care as much. So they didn't appear to understand advertising how it works because they didn't really think about it. It's like, well, I'm getting this free content. I don't really question why or how. Definitely don't want to pay for it. Whereas beyond that age group, so 25 plus, they've got a broad understanding that they're getting free content in this change for viewing advertising. So definitely some demographic differences. Right. Great. Just a part of clarification, one of our viewers had to leave the webinar for a minute or two and missed the reference to the consumer downtime. Was it 12 to 12 midnight to six in the morning or something like that? Yes. It was that kind of when it was kind of the flattest in the graph that I showed. That sounds about right at midnight to about six a.m. Okay. Is Facebook, Instagram still the longest platform for social media advertising or is TikTok now taking over perhaps Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I guess I accept the major question there is which digital formats do you think would be the most popular in 2022? So probably wouldn't necessarily comment on which exact kind of platforms are the best, however you define the best. They all have a very unique role. So I believe that consumers go to them for different sort of purposes and have different kind of connections within all of them. So I think social will continue to be strong. So next time I kind of had have ad spend data in April, I imagine that social will continue to be strong because consumers are still enjoying spending time on it. Yes, TikTok and things like that have really appealed to new new ways of doing things and have been really popular. But also I think let's not forget the how how gaming has really become very mainstream and people are turning to that all different types of people and all different age groups, as well as things like audio. And then we've got really kind of newer formats like connected television, for example, starting to take off. And even things like virtual reality or augmented reality, although they haven't completely taken off and become mainstream yet, I think they will be really exciting for consumers and will will hopefully become popular. Okay, you wouldn't believe how many questions we've got here and I personally can't get through them all. I'll do my best over the next few minutes to get through as many as I can. Is there any evidence that premium markets operate differently online different times of the day, different habits, etc. So premium markets. So is that in terms of kind of luxury goods? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we didn't have that as a subsection specifically within the research I just showed. But there are bound to be areas of difference within some of the findings between sort of the more affluent end of consumers compared to the other end of the scale. So I think you've asked to kind of answer that now. It would be big generalizations, but yes, in a nutshell, there would be differences in attitudes. Okay. For a company taking part in B2B marketing, we'll post the podcast after people have finished working. So working hours typically increase engagement. It's a very specific question. Can you say that again? Sorry, for a company taking part in B2B marketing, we'll post in podcasts after people have finished work. Typically increase engagement. It's a great time to reach people, yes. So I think it depends whether your podcast is live or one that you download, but I'm pretty sure that would be a very optimum time to reach a person on kind of the typical after work session in the community. Is the new social platform Telegram a good one for business or consumer? I don't know is the answer. Yes. I wouldn't be able to comment on that one specifically. I don't have very in-depth knowledge of it. So I'm going to pass on that question. There's a new one on the internet. Have you any insights into generation alpha specifically in relation to your research? So off the top of my head is generation alpha, the children of millennials. You've got me there. Yes, it's knowing all of the generations. So if that's correct, we didn't specifically look into children within this research, but I think it's going to be a very different story to see their reactions to advertising and whether they have this kind of attitude that of course content should be for free and not questioning where it comes from. I think there's going to be a need for showing respect within the environment that they're in. I think there's going to be things like gaming, for example, to not get in the way of the experience. And the same for social media, just to acknowledge that they haven't gone on there to be exposed to advertising and making sure it adds value in some way and stays the right side of respecting their needs, like frequency capping and not over-personalising. If I've got the generation rights, that would be a very interesting study to find out how attitudes are changing over time. On the subject of frequency capping, is there an optimum number? I hope you calculate that. It very much depends on the format, so I'm sure it would be different for things like video versus a banner advertisement. It would depend on the message behind the campaign. But as a very blunt rule of thumb, I'd say definitely no more than three or four times. Just a couple more questions and then we'll have to move on. So why do media companies sell their digital tools based on click-through rates? It's always the first thing they offer. What should we be asking to see instead? Yes, I think that's why one of the reasons we have undertaken the campaign and we found that it was the easiest one, the most measurable, the most instant. It's really hard to change that opinion, but what you're missing out on is getting under the iceberg and understanding the long-term effects of the campaign. The brand building aspect, not just did you see the add and click and that's the end of story. So in terms of what you should be looking at, it's based on what your campaign is trying to measure. So for example, if it's an awareness, how many people did you reach? Or if it's something like changing opinions of your product, that might be best discovered via something like a branding survey. By the way, half a generation, apparently there are people who have been born between 2010 and 2025. So final question then. One of your slides highlighted that email advertising had only increased by 10% over the six-year period. Do you see this declining in the future? Should we focus on other areas? Email advertising. So I would say that it is a good channel. It is effective. Consumers read them if they're interested in that particular product. So I wouldn't say to discount it at all. It would be good as part of a more holistic, medium mix, digital and other channels, of course. So I'd never say unless there was some strong evidence on the contrary to stop doing something unless consumers, things like pop-ups, they're telling you that we don't enjoy our experience being interrupted. So as part of the mix, email advertising is effective. If I got this right, I guess your attribution study will look into that sort of thing as well, does it? The toolkit looks into which methods to use depending on what your campaign is doing or what tools you have in-house. So it explains things like when to use attribution or when to use market mix modelling or branding studies. Okay, great. Well, Hannah, we've run out of time. That was great. So I think you'll all agree that we have some really great questions there from our viewers and it's a shame we just don't have more time to get through some more of them. But thank you very much for answering the ones that you did and some really great advice and hopefully some useful tips that our viewers can take away. Thank you, Hannah. Okay, so let's move on to our next guest speaker, a newer marketing specialist, Katie Hart. Now Katie presented a newer marketing webinar for us back in 2020, which proved so popular that we just had to get her back to give us an update on the insights this fascinating topic provides. So if you're ready, Katie, take it away. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Phil. Okay, so newer marketing. First, it's it may be something that some of you are familiar with or some of you have come across. But really what I'm going to do over the course of the next sort of 45 minutes or so is give you a much greater sense of clarity about what newer marketing actually is. Now, I could do that very quickly. I could just give you a definition such as this very eloquent one from Roger Dooley. Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to marketing. There, job done. That may be straightforward. It may mean something to you or it may not mean much to you at all, but I hope by the end of this session I will have provided greater clarity. Essentially, what we're doing in neuro marketing is we are really looking at, I suppose, listening there to Hannah's presentation. We are looking at the other side of the screen. So we are looking at the consumer and we are looking at what goes on inside the consumer's brain in particular. So we are bringing a very human element into marketing. Indeed, really, it's sort of the science of actually human decision making. So it brings in cognitive science, which are things like memory and attention and perception. Some of these core functions of how we interact with the world around us. And it gives us a chance to see those at play within the brain and understand how that information is then used to help somebody come to make decisions. And obviously in the case of marketing, hopefully purchasing decisions. So it's really about taking an understanding of customers needs, customers motivations, customers preferences. A lot of the things that I'm sure we all do and have done for years. All these processes that we try to adopt, which enable us to really predict and understand our customers behaviors to enable us to be able to serve them and fulfill them more efficiently. So as good marketers, I'm sure you all do it as I say many of us have spent years doing it. We spend a lot of time and resources asking our customers what they want. So we would diligently go out and we would carry out research, we might do focus groups, we would do surveys, all sorts of different formats that we can conduct. And then we would bring those back to the office and we would use those to ensure that the products or the services that we build are actually going to be relevant and are actually going to serve their needs or potentially plug a gap for them. And maybe if we're doing marketing research, what we would also do is develop strategies for the most efficient and the most effective way to enable us to market those products and services to them. Now, as I say, this is very diligent and it's fantastic and it's where we all should be having those conversations with our customers is really important. However, I'm afraid there is one fundamental flaw with doing this, and that is the fact that most of our customers don't actually know what they want. This is because when it comes to making decisions, somewhere between 90 or up to 95% of what goes into making our decisions is unconscious. So this is information that we ourselves do not have access to. So that means with the best will in the world, we don't know why we are making the decisions that we do. We don't know why we've made the purchases that we have. Now, I'll talk to you in a bit more detail in a few moments about the implications of that and the ways that you can try and address it. But essentially what this means is that when we do conventional market research at best, we are accessing the 5%, the 10% potentially of what goes into the decision making process. Whereas when we do neuro marketing, what we are actually trying to do is understand that 95%. So see if we can extract, see if we can work out actually what is going on. See if we can use that to understand more fundamentally how our customers are reacting at an unconscious level. And we have some great examples. We've all got them. We've all seen them examples where customers either can't or perhaps won't accurately describe their preferences or explain how their decisions are made. The infamous Pepsi challenge that was conducted where people were asked to blind test Pepsi as opposed to blind test Coca-Cola. And in the Pepsi challenge, the findings were really solid and really strong that the majority of people preferred the taste of Pepsi. And I'm sure that the senior execs that Pepsi must have been elated to see the results of this. And yet it never actually transpired into consumer purchases. Still Coca-Cola was the dominant brand. Still they retained more market share. So even when taste tests were done and blind taste tests were done, which in theory should give us a good robust scientific background, actually the findings that we were given did not lead to indications of what the behavior would be actually in the real world. And I'm sure we've all got examples ourselves. I mean, I don't want to judge any of you, but maybe I'll use myself as an example. How about that then? I know there are lots of things that I should do. So I should eat more salad and vegetables every day than I probably do. I should go to the gym five times a week. There's all sorts of things I should do. However, I don't always do them. And sometimes I feel as though I have really good solid intentions. New Year's resolutions. I don't know how many of you made those New Year's resolutions. But today we are one month in, 1st of February. How are they going? How are you doing with those? Congratulations if you're still smashing them. Personally some of mine have already slipped. And that's because the bit that we are consciously using of our brain is not always the bit that drives us. It's not always the bit that makes the decisions for us. So I want to give you a bit of appreciation of actually what your brain is doing. I want you to show your brain some love because it is an incredibly complicated organ. And it is so, so busy. And I have nothing but admiration for it. But it is not perfect. I will certainly tell you that. So as a neuroscientist I spend a lot of time learning about the brain, discovering the brain, looking at what it actually does. And I just want to share some of that with you to give you a sense of actually what this organ is that drives our decisions every day. So it's made up of 86 billion neurons for a start. Now that's the kind of number I can't really get my head around. People compare it to the number of stars that there are in the known universe, things like that. It is absolutely phenomenal. Each of those neurons potentially can connect to up to 7000 other neurons as well. So the complexity of the electrical networks within our brain is absolutely phenomenal. And it works quickly. It can work really quickly. Signals within your brain can travel up to 268 miles per hour. That is one of the sort of super highways that happens within our brain. That's sort of the equivalent of stubbing your toe on something. That message travels the length of your body incredibly quickly and highlights something as being pain. So those are some of the fastest signals that travel within the brain. But you can see the speeds at which they are traveling to convey that message from our physical environment into decision making action within the brain. All of this happens based on water, so please do keep hydrated. It really is important to your brain. That's why you'll start to feel sluggish if you aren't hydrated. It needs water to work efficiently. Interestingly, it also needs cholesterol, so please don't go on a really extreme cholesterol busting diet because something like 20 or 25% of the cholesterol that's in your body is actually within your brain. It definitely needs you to keep providing that. It weighs roughly 1.3 kilograms. So it's about, again on average, it's about 2% of your body weight is retained within your brain. So it's very influential considering the size that it has. It's responsible for something between 30 and 50,000 thoughts per day. 30 to 50,000 thoughts every day. Now that, I think, is exciting. I think it's so tangible to think of all those little thoughts just flashing by within your brain. But then the research, I'm afraid, turns really negative because 95% of those thoughts are likely to be the same as the ones you had yesterday. Yeah, their thoughts about what you're having for dinner and the mundane things that we all do all day every day. And sadly, there is a phenomenal piece of research that shows that something like 80% of those thoughts will be negative. So they will be criticizing ourselves or viewing other people negatively as well. So that gives you a sense of how busy your brain is. In terms of marketing, on average, in the Western world, we are exposed to about 4,000 advertisements every single day. Now that is obviously massive. And again, just looking at the research that Hannah's been talking about, the potential for those figures to have changed or in terms of the nature of the advertisements we would have seen. They would no longer have been on billboards and on buses and on underground stations during lockdown. But they would have been ones which would have been presented to us through sponsored content on our social feeds and things, but 4,000 advertisements every day. And your brain really is doing a phenomenal job of managing all of this. And how it does this is by switching most of it off. So the bit that we are consciously aware of, as we've said, is only a small amount of what's going on around us. But the brain is still processing all of it. So it is still making decisions based on what it's seeing, what it's hearing. It's still monitoring your digestive system, your body temperature, your balance, all sorts of different elements. So it is incredibly busy. And what we can see is examples of this. So for instance, you may have had a situation where you might be in the office or perhaps over Christmas recently, if you had an opportunity to get together with groups of people, it's something which used to be called the cocktail party phenomena. And it's a situation where you describe being in a busy room, lots of conversations are happening. You're involved in a conversation with a few people in a group, but somewhere else in the room you hear your name being mentioned. And that attracts your attention. Now what we know is that you must have been scanning the other conversations in the room at some level for you to have registered that one of those conversations included your own name. So although this piece of research was done in the 50s and it was all about attention and what attracts our attention. It's actually been really instrumental for us within neuroscience to start to use phenomena like this to understand how these processes occur within the brain. And what we've discovered is that there is there are clear differences underneath this sort of conscious and unconscious information that the brain is processing. So you may have read it's the Daniel Kahneman fast and slow thinking. You may have heard people talk about reptilian brains or all sorts of different terms that are used. But essentially we have two levels at which we can process information, one of which is the very rational. It's the it's the cortex. It's the the sort of crinkled top surface that we see when we look at a brain. And that is it's about in terms of our evolutionary history. It's about four million years old. So we have evolved this. It's a very efficient system that we have. We can control what goes on in it. It's the information that we are very conscious of and it allows us to reflect back into the past and to anticipate forwards into the future. But it isn't perfect. It takes a huge amount of effort to actually run this great resource that we have. I talked about how the brain is 2% of your body weight, but actually it consumes 20% of the resources that your body takes in. So things like oxygen and blood and nutrition, 20% of those resources will be absorbed by the brain. So it is very resource intensive. Contrast to that cortex, the middle at the sort of the top of our spine right at the core of our brain is the oldest part of our brain, which is why some people call it the reptilian brain. Yeah, you thought four million years old was old. The reptilian one is more like 500 million years old. So it is a very different creature, a very different animal, literally. It's reptilian. It's in the present. It doesn't care about the past. It doesn't think about the future. It is always on. So it is always analyzing what's going on around you when you're asleep. This part of your brain is still active. It's still processing your environment and looking at what's going on. And it's still working out whether things are potential threats or potential opportunities for us. But the good news is this part of your brain is effortless. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to worry about your body temperature when you're asleep. You don't have to remember to breathe in and out. You don't have to control any of the myriad of operations that that part of your brain is doing. So essentially what we've got are two very different parts of our brain. And most of the research that is done, conventional market research is really looking at what happens within that very new, that cortex, that rational side of the brain. But we need to start doing something different. Because I've already talked about how resource intensive the brain is. But the good news is the brain is hardwired for efficiency. It is designed to try and be as efficient as it can be. And one of the ways it does this is using something called heuristics. So I want you please wherever you're sitting to just put your pen down or your cup of coffee down or whatever you've got in your hands. And I want you to just fold your arms for me please. I'm trusting that some of you have done that. Please don't leave me hanging. So hopefully you've just folded your arms. Thank you very much. Right now unfold them and place your hands out in front of you. And what I want you to do this time is fold them again but fold them the other way. So fold them the opposite way to the way you normally fold your arms. Now I don't know how easily you found that. It's okay. You can undo it now. And if you haven't been able to fold your arms the other way yet, please don't worry about it. You can practice that at a later time. What that is doing is demonstrating to you heuristics and heuristics are the shortcuts that our brain evolves. So when you do something for the first time, your brain is like slashing through a jungle. It's it's quite hard. It's quite clunky. It doesn't feel a smooth process. And in terms of those signals and connections within the brain, they will be among the slowest. So if we are trying to learn to drive or learn a new language or learn a musical instrument or something, our first attempts will be really quite clunky, perhaps quite disjointed and disorganized. The more we rehearse something though, the smoother this gets and the faster those connections will take place in the brain. And they then become insulated by myelin, which speeds up the way the connections are able to be transmitted within the brain. So over time, you get a much smoother and much more efficient path until you eventually reach that superhighway of you being able to fold your arms as you did the first time in a very efficient, almost effortless manner. And that's what the brain does. It tries to make processes as efficient as possible and it tries to apply its scarce resources as efficiently as possible. So by using these shortcuts, it's able to achieve that. So what it's going to do is rely on lots of shortcuts that it has designed, that it has created over the years, things that we may have hardwired in us or things that we may have learnt when we are younger. And these will be condensed in our unconscious processes and the brain will use those to make some of those buying decisions for us. So when I say we're not in control of those decisions, we're not aware of the things we do, a lot of it will be based upon these shortcuts and these heuristics. So how do we know all of this? Well, neuro marketing is based on neuroscience, which is the study of the nervous system, the central nervous system, and in particular, the brain. Now, I hope you all aren't trying to eat your lunch as I'm speaking to you because this device is probably everything that you're dreading me telling you it is. It's the old way that people would have studied the brain. Now, unlike many other organs within the body, if you have a brain in front of you working, it doesn't reveal much to you at all. The heart you can see pumping, the lungs you will see inflating and deflating, but the brain doesn't reveal much to you at all. So, historically, anatomists, physicists, people who were trying to study it had a real uphill task. They would have used a device like this to actually drill through the skull because what they would have been reduced to doing is drilling through the skull of somebody who was alive and having a look at what was going on in their brain. When they see nothing, nothing observable from the outside, what they then started doing is stimulating the brain. So poking it, running electrical currents through all sorts of things to try and work out what the function was and what particular areas of the brain were responsible for. So you can imagine that some people didn't come out of operations and investigative studies like that the same way that they went into them. They didn't come out with additional skills. Very often they came out with less abilities than they went in. We also learned a huge amount through accidents and injury. There are some very famous cases of those that are studied within neuroscience as well. But thankfully things have progressed a huge amount and we no longer have to ask people to take that kind of risk when signing up for research for us. Because we now have some very exciting technologies which enable us to do research on an active human brain where we can see what it is doing. We can see the areas that are activated. We can see what's going on. These are some images which are taken from an FMRI scanner. So if you've seen MRI scanners in hospitals, this is a functional MRI scanner. So it means you could get people to actually carry out tasks and things while they're in it. And what it's effectively doing is measuring the oxygen use within the brain. So in order to conduct activities, the brain uses oxygen and then it has to replace that oxygen. So through using FMRI, what we're able to do is see which areas are activated in completing tasks. And it has made us so much more aware of the processes that are going on. So things like we've now learnt that this central part I was talking to you about, this sort of corbit, the reptilian brain, it includes a part called the amygdala and this is really phenomenal in terms of some of the purchases we make. It's a very emotional area of the brain and it holds lots of emotional strength and connections. And what we've been able to discover by looking at FMRI is that actually the messages, the signals that get sent between the amygdala and the cortex. So these are the messages that go from a rational cortex to the emotional amygdala are only half as many as there are messages that go from the emotions out to the rational part of the brain. So very often we do things first, we rationalize about them afterwards. We find ourselves feeling angry, we're in that state quite quickly and then only afterwards does the rational cortex have a chance to sort of override what's going on. So that's an important thing I'll come to in a moment in terms of marketing. It's also given us really powerful information about our senses and the way that the senses process what they see and all the different stimuli that they get about the environment around us. And again, we can see that some senses respond really quickly and really powerfully and go straight to that reptilian core. Whereas for instance, auditory signals are nothing like a sophisticated, they're nothing like as quick as some of the visual signals that we interpret. So this has been tremendous for us to understand and interrogate what's going on. But there are some other ways we can use as well. So I talked about at the start the fact that as good marketers we go out and we ask customers things and that's great. But personally over the years I've learned not really to trust that so much, but I still go out and I still ask those questions. Only now what I'm doing is I am using different methods to ascertain a more honest response. So I'm using things like physiological measures, which actually when we look at them in real world scenarios are a much more accurate predictor of future behavior than what people report they will do. So things like facial coding. So looking at the tiny almost involuntary muscles that move in our face as we talk. And these can convey a huge amount of information about the way we are feeling. So whether we are surprised by something, whether we like what we see, whether we are concealing and holding back something, all of that is really powerful information which can be seen in our face. By listening to the voice as well, doing vocal analysis, you gain tremendous amounts of information about the way people are saying their response. I'm not concentrating on actually what they're saying, I'm concentrating again on how they are saying it. So that gives us a lot more insight. In addition to that though, I overlay some different methods. So we use this is electro dermal activity or you might know as galvanic skin response. They're basically many lie detectors. And what these do are detect changes in the electrical conductance of the skin. So these are all physiological changes that your body puts into place very quickly. So if your brain identifies something as being a threat, it will stimulate your body and trigger your body and provide it with all the hormones and resources and everything it needs to cope with that threat. You don't have to consciously make that decision, your brain does it all for you. So what we can see by taking these physiological measures is the raw information that the brain is interpreting about what it sees around it. Does it like what it sees? Is it attracted to it? Because if we find something attractive, again, our brain sends different chemicals and different messages out and our pupils dilate and we respond in a very different way. So these are the measures that we are taking. And because these are physiological and biometric, they are usually much more reliable because these aren't things we can control or influence. These are in that unconscious realm of the reptilian brain and what is happening on an automatic level for us. It was also mentioned during Hannah's presentation, but eye tracking is something that we can add into the equation. So by looking at particularly, so for instance, we can look at advertisements and see exactly which part of a vision board or something that isn't being presented to a subject. Which parts actually draw their attention? Which parts do they notice? Where is their concentration held? Are they even reading that writing? Are they looking at the call to action button? Have they noticed that graphic that we've put in the top right hand corner? So we can see exactly where people are looking. We can then take this out into the real world and we can look at people as they go around the supermarket, as they walk through shopping centre or as they take a journey on the London Underground. And we can see actually of all the different, those 4,000 advertisements that people are exposed to all day every day. We can see exactly which ones they notice and which part of that advertisement is it that draws them in. And then we can use something called EEG, which is electro encephalography. And what this does is you put a headset over participants and it measures the tiny electrical activity which the brain uses to convey those signals and to send those messages. So we can then use these results to tell us a huge amount of information about what is actually going on in the brain. Now EEG is brilliant because like electrodermal activity, like eye tracking, it is happening millisecond by millisecond. So I can literally get a thousand measurements per second when I'm doing research on EEG. So you get a huge volume of data that gives a split response instantly. How is somebody judging that? Within a fraction of a second I can tell how they've judged it, how their brain has interpreted it. So it's tremendously powerful and can be very specific. And in order to get maximum output from this, it works really well if we combine things. So you can imagine if we're using eye tracking alongside EEG, I can tell exactly at which part of an advertisement somebody was looking when their brain created a particular response or a particular spike. So that gives us such a volume of tremendously powerful information. So what I want to do just for a few minutes is give you some examples of how neuro marketing has been used or in particular ways that I've been using neuro marketing recently. Firstly, a B2B example. I was working with an organization who wanted to find out what was the optimum layout for a web landing page. And we were wanting to research people at you, marketing professionals. And so we designed some research based around sharing the same content, but just changing the format of how that content was presented. And we actually came up with 19 different layouts that we measured during this research. And the lovely thing about this study was we actually did three pieces of research in one. So we did my neuro marketing research, which meant putting that EEG headset onto participants and recording their responses as they looked at all these different layouts. Alongside that what we did was some conventional market research. So we asked them a few demographic questions at the start of the study. And again, at the end of the study, we came back to them and asked them a few questions about their preferences and which ones they preferred and which ones they could recall. So we did some much more kind of mainstream research. And then the third bit we did alongside this is we actually split test some of these. So we put some of them live, we published them and use them alongside the study that we were doing. Now, huge amounts of information were gathered as a result of doing this. And I can make the full report available to you. So if you want information in detail, please let me know. But the headlines were really interesting. So very often we are told to use images and, you know, the images create that connection and that report. But you can see here we had three of the 19 layouts which used images. And actually of those three, one was a real clear winner. Now, I don't know how you feel as you look at each of these images. Actually, maybe I do. Maybe I should be more careful. Of the three, what we found are that people recalled the image with the female and the group image quite strongly. But in terms of the activity within their brain, the image with the single male at the bottom of your screen was the most positive. And when I went back and I looked at what was going on in the brain, although a number of people recall seeing the female on her own in an image, that image itself was creating a stress response. People did not find it comfortable to look at that image. They were quite triggered by it, quite threatened. There was quite a fear response, which was going on. So when we are selecting images to use, it's really important that we think and we really understand what's going on. The image of the group is one that I'm afraid I think of it sometimes as being a lazy marketing thing to do. It's got lots of people in there, lots of different ages, lots of different genders and racial backgrounds and all sorts of demographics included in there, which is great. But actually what you end up with is the brain switching off. There was just too much for the brain. So normally our brain is drawn to human faces. And actually what happened here is the focus of all those human faces took so much away from the actual concentration that the message failed to get delivered in the same way. So lots of different insights came out of that. I'm afraid as a neuroscientist with a background in psychology, I did what we always do and you put in the unexpected. So we created a few broken links on some of these documents for people as well. And we got some fantastic footage about what happens within the brain when somebody stumbles across a broken link on your website too. So all sorts of really useful pieces of information came from that. A different example coming up next. This is another of the heuristics which the brain uses and it's called Peridolia. I'm sure you've experienced it even if you didn't know the long-winded term for it. It's the way the brain is hardwired to detect patterns which we interpret as faces. So you can imagine in terms of our background and our evolutionary past being able to quickly identify a face and determine whether it's a threat or whether it's a friend would have been incredibly important to our survival. And we still have this ability within us. So this Peridolia is a concept which I did some research for Unilever. Just to look at actually how engaged are we? You know we know that when we see humans we engage in a very different level from the way we respond when we see inanimate objects and many products. Where's Peridolia sit on that spectrum? So that was another piece of research that I did recently for them. And hot off the press. I'm only allowed to half tell you about this one. I've just been doing some work actually with the CIM and we've been looking at the way the brain has responded to some of the core messages which have been literally life-saving messages which have been given out by our government over the last couple of years. Because not all the communications that we convey are about selling a product or promoting a service. They are sometimes about creating that behaviour change. And you know there are some, here are some of the examples of the ones we used in that research. Hopefully that will be being published in the next, what am I going to say? Two to three weeks, fingers crossed. But if you're a member of the CIM keep your eyes peeled for that because they will be promoting it through all their usual channels. But just to give you some other examples, things like the underground system, the subway system in Tokyo found that by changing the lighting within their entire system they could have a drastic impact on the prevalence of suicides. So the brain responds, the way it sees colour is obviously through wavelengths and it responds in different ways to different colours that it sees. And blue is a very short wavelength and it stops us from being impulsive. And what they did in Tokyo was introduced a blue tinge to the lighting on their Tokyo underground system. And as a result of just that one change, the number of suicides within the following 12 months dropped by 74%. So just slight small changes which maybe many of the occupants, many of the users of the underground wouldn't have noticed on a day to day basis, just changes the way our brain is responding and making some of those decisions. If we want to make people eat more healthily there are some key things we can do there. There was a study I was reading recently which changed the order that food was presented in in a school canteen. And as a result precisely the same meals, precisely the same options available, but by just changing the order that the food was available in, they managed to increase the number of healthy options which were consumed by 28%. So that can be phenomenal. That can be the start of a really healthy habit being created there. So when we're doing neuro marketing we aren't always just thinking about the promoting and the selling side. Sometimes we have got these broader bigger messages going on. But also when we're doing neuro marketing sometimes we get some real surprises or some lovely examples and I want to introduce you to one here. This was a lovely lady who I was doing some research on called Jill. And I was doing a piece of research in Jill's office with a number of her colleagues. And at various points in the research I said to the participants, do you mind if I just take your photo to use in social media? And in Jill's office everybody said, oh no you're not taking my photo. No, no, no I don't want to be on social media. Jill will wait until it's Jill's turn, she'll do it. So when Jill came at the end of the research I said to her, oh by the way, I'd gather you're not likely to mind, would it be okay if I take your photo and use it for social media purposes? And what happened was beautiful because Jill hesitated and for a few short moments she seemed to be wrestling to make a decision. And then she sort of shook her head and said, no, no, that's fine. Yeah, that's okay, go ahead. Now the beautiful thing about this is all the time this was happening Jill was still wearing the headset. So here is what was going on inside Jill's brain at the moment that I asked. So what you're looking at here is a raw data feed out which came from the EEG headset she was wearing. Down the left hand side you can see the figures that start with AF3, that's your anterior frontal cortex right at the front on your forehead. And it goes down to 01 which is your occipital lobe which is what creates vision which is right at the back. And you'll see all those numbers are odd which means they're in the left hemisphere and then you get the same figures in reverse, occipital 02 is now jumping over onto the right hemisphere and then that corresponds all the way forwards to anterior frontal 04 which is the right hemisphere at the front just on your forehead. So you can see that all across her brain things were just frantic. There was just utter desperation before she got it calm took a breath and said, yeah, yeah, that's fine. So sometimes it's really quite useful to know what we are inflicting on people when we think it's a very simple straightforward request. Ultimately, what neuro marketing is doing though is it's enabling us to see how and why we are making the buying decisions that we do. But really for me that's only half the job because conducting research like this is fantastic, but it's very specific sometimes. You know, I've tested out 19 different web layouts of GDPR information. What we need to do is find out how brains respond to different content, different subject matters. But obviously in terms of being robust and scientific, the more variables I change the less I know it's about the layout and the more any responses that we got which were different could have been caused by the content instead. So I love doing research and it's very informative and very exciting. But for me the other side of neuro marketing is actually the putting it into action and is actually working with people to apply what we've learned. There's all sorts of researchers all over the world who are out there doing research like I'm doing and we pull all of this knowledge and all of this information and try to make it accessible and try to make it available. We are learning so much about the way our brain works, about the way it sees the world and the way it interacts with the world around us. It really is now a huge wealth of information that we are starting to amass and that can be used to provide not only insight and knowledge, but then apply that knowledge and insight to ultimately make our marketing more effective and more profitable for our organizations. So I hope that's been useful. I hope you now feel as though you have a better understanding about what neuro marketing actually is. Few contact details there for you. If you're so inclined also just to let you know on my website each month I actually get people to take part in a study. So if you want to be involved in that do log on to the website. It's literally one question. So just go on to that and if you want to get the findings you can get those when I write them up as a blog later. And then there is a new one which appears every month. So if you're interested in this subject and you want to actually get involved, please do pop along there and let me know. Otherwise, I'm very happy to answer any questions that may have come in. That's great. Thanks Katie. That was really fascinating stuff. I think my wife would love to have one of those headsets stuff on me and she talked to me. Ask me things, give me instructions. Yeah, that would be fascinating. Okay, so again we're going to have 15 minutes or so Q&A session with Katie. So please keep your questions coming in for that. First few questions actually Katie about the study you conducted into GDPR training I believe it was. Yeah, so the first question is why did the female image create a stress response? Whoever asked that question. I love it. I love it. I didn't know the answer to that. So I went away and I trained as a face whisperer. So now I do know the answer to things like that because I don't like not knowing. What we discovered when we actually analysed it is that her response, the way she's presented herself is slightly imposing I suppose is the word. So although both she and the male image that was at the bottom of the screen had their arms folded. So in terms of typical body language they were both quite closed and inaccessible. His face was much more open and much more authentic and sincere, whereas she wasn't. She looked much more posed and there was a conflict between what the bottom half of her face said which was a smile and the top half which were her eyes which actually weren't smiling. Now that's one of the easiest ways to tell a genuine smile is when the eyes are smiling as well, you know it's coming from a very positive place. Hers was not and when I spoke to the person who trained me about studying faces and looking at facial coding like this. Their suggestion was that actually she was slightly judgmental. There was a there was a sort of an arrogance about her. She was slightly condescending in the way that she presented and what we particularly found was that it was the male participants who responded very negatively towards that really negatively. So at an unconscious level we picked up on something that we felt either threatened by or judged by but yeah it's in the tiny minute details. So really had nothing to do with gender was all to do with facial expression. No, I mean the response was was quite different in terms of gender. And so that was naturally one of the things that I wanted to then go and look into to see to see what was causing that but yeah it wasn't it definitely wasn't gender alone. It was much more about the micro expressions of what was presented on her face. Okay, just wanted to more questions about that particular study. So did the image it did the images a perform the text only versions. Yes they did. Yep. The we also trialled one which I showed there which was white text against a black background and only had a very simplistic image which was a text box on it. And that was the most popular that was the one which the brain engaged with most. And looking at it it was really quite interesting because we actually did two variations of that and the only difference between the two was the location of the call to action button. And there was some profound differences in terms of responses to it just based on location of that call to action button. So sometimes just making these really small changes can have really significant impacts. But what was lovely as part of doing that research was we also had the live split tests which were being conducted. And what we found is that the the conventional research what people said they liked was not accurate in terms of what happened in the split test so people said they could recall one image or they particularly liked a different layout. But that never transpired into actual behavior in the split tests. Whereas what I'd recorded in terms of activity in the brain aligned really neatly to what people actually did in those real world scenarios so it just shows the importance of actually conducting those those sort of split test trials before you do put any content out. Fascinating. And someone's asked the question what does happen when someone stumbles across a broken link. So you've seen some of the layouts that they had they were given an opportunity to click on a link and sign up to receive some additional information. And what we found is that the point at which they click on a link and it's broken the stress levels rise in the brain and the engagement levels drop. Now that's perhaps not unusual you know I think most of us could have predicted that but what I didn't predict is the fact that when somebody comes across that sort of blue screen of death where you know you get the error message that comes up. And the brain has all of those responses and and it plays out and you shut the link down and you go off in a different direction. What we then noticed is that actually there is a legacy to that broken link. So if people were quite reasonably engaged before and they then see the broken link and their engagement levels drop. When they come back they are never as engaged as they were before so you've you've lost them and you've then got to work hard to get them back to to their previous state. So yeah, it's it's really important we try to avoid having those because they not only create that that sort of abrupt interruption of people who are in the flow making their purchasing decisions but they then lose some of that engagement for it never to come back to the same degree. Okay, fascinating. One or two people have actually asked how they can get their hands on the full report I guess is that something they could request by your website or email you. Yes, I mean if they want to if you want to email me or yeah probably the best thing to do is to if you go on to my website and email me through that I can then send you a link for that full report. Can you just remind us what your URL is your website address is. Katie heart dot co dot UK. Simple as that. Great. Okay, thanks very much. So around all of this. Is it possible for small agencies or people with small budgets to access neuro marketing. Yeah, definitely and that's that's the beautiful thing about this. You know initially when it first came out. It was prohibitively expensive. I mean FMRI equipment still is prohibitively expensive you're talking about. 2000 pounds an hour to hire FMRI equipment. However, the more the more we know the more we learn the less we actually need to rely on those sorts of technologies. So it is becoming much more accessible and much more available. I do some research with some really small agencies now as well which is great to see because that's, you know, that's part of my. My values is about championing making sure that everybody has access to this information, not just the really big corporates. But they're also the more of us there are out here doing research, you know, there's more books on it now there's more blogs on it. There's all sorts of content which is becoming available so people are able to access it and and have a go and use it alongside split test try applying it. So people are able to to apply it and see for themselves what evidence they get even though they may not have exactly the results that are specific to their particular campaign but it will enable them to get some of the benefits that others have to. And somebody asked, could you recommend any books on this subject? Yeah, loads. If you could see me here I'm surrounded by books permanently surrounded by books. There is one called Brain Fluence, which is by Roger Dooley. That's probably a really good one to to get you started and get you thinking. So our company is looking to improve the amount of reviews for our products. Have you come across any methods which has improved the likelihood of this behavior? The only way to the only way that I've come across which serves for things like that is to apply neuro marketing early in the process so that actually what you're then getting is much more customer satisfaction and customer delight being delivered. There are ways that you can work to build the relationship so customers are more likely to leave you reviews. There are things you can do that can actually encourage that. So the sort of language that you use the way you set out your emails where you ask people to leave reviews. All of those can be tweaked and changed so that you can hopefully gain more people to gain an increase in the number of people who actually provide those reviews. But as I say you need to make sure you've also got the satisfied customers in the first place because you don't want reviews unless they're going to be good positive ones for you. Okay, 95% of what goes into making decisions is unconscious. This viewer assumes this applies only to consumer purchases. He or she works in the IT technology business and is sure a lot of thought reasoning goes into purchases made. Is that correct? We would like to hope so. However, no, all the evidence suggests that because when we are sitting around that table in our decision making unit, we will be in a very rational state. We may create a procurement process which is very rigorous and allows us to quantify and give ratings for people that pitch. We can go through all of that but still underneath all of that is this huge unconscious sense of what's going on. So it comes down to whether we like the person that gave us the pitch. It comes down to the feel of the paper in our hands that their proposal may have been presented on when they gave it out to us. It is absolutely vast. So I'm not aware of there being any drastically different data for people who are in a B2B situation because ultimately our brain, even our new brain is 4 million years old. It doesn't know whether it's in business mode or home mode. We are still processing all of that information about our environment and from our environment on the same basis regardless of whether we're in B2C decision making or whether we're on our way home as a consumer decision making. Great. A question around the Coca-Cola Pepsi taste test example. Have you got any ideas to why Coca-Cola remains the dominant brand despite the fact that it doesn't taste so good? Well, yes. I led you. Thank you. There's two levels to answer that on. The first is that when people conducted the initial Pepsi challenge, they were only given a small sample of each drink to try. Now, Pepsi tends to be much sweeter. It's a much stronger sugar recipe than Coca-Cola was. And our brains are hardwired to respond positively to sweet things. So you can imagine, again, back in our evolutionary past, it would have been quite rare to find food sources that gave you that source of sugar. So we are hardwired to respond positively to them. So a small amount of that, our brains responded really positively. However, too much of that and our brains start to feel overloaded. So the first response to that is if the samples have been full cans, when the research has been conducted again, it is far less clear cut that Pepsi comes out as the winner. So that's one side of the argument. The other side is that when people do not do it blind, so when they are shown whether they are drinking Pepsi or drinking Coke and we do it as a neuro marketing piece of research and we can see what's going on in their brains. When people are drinking Coca-Cola, that amygdala, I talked to you about that emotional core is triggered really strongly, along with the hippocampus, which is memories and it's where we store a lot of our memories. So we believe, and the research that conducted this concluded that actually, if you took away all of the branding, if you took away everything we know about Coca-Cola and Pepsi as a brand, and you went just on taste, Pepsi may still win. But when we go into the store or when we're in a restaurant, we're ordering a drink, we bring to that decision making process everything we know, everything we've learned about it. You know, the holidays are coming and, you know, all the campaigns that Coca-Cola did and all the engagement and traction that they had over the years and all of that comes into making that decision. So when we look at what's going on in the brain for Coca-Cola, the hippocampus and the amygdala are very active and they're very vibrant and they are absolutely influencing the decision that people make if we know which brand is which. All right, fascinating again. Have you looked at how people with disabilities use different parts, roots of the brain for similar tasks? And the example here is somebody with dyslexia. No. I'm just completing, I'm delighted to say, a master's degree in applied neuroscience and we did have a module looking at neurodiversity and how different, you know, we're not all the same, not all brains are built the same and look the same. It's not something that I personally have researched, but it's something that we need to be absolutely alert and aware of. There are elements that I've studied that are really powerful in terms of, for instance, when we look at things like peridolia and face recognition, we had to make sure in that that we weren't including people who were autistic because they do respond to faces and social situations in quite different ways. So it's something that we are absolutely mindful to. Interestingly, whenever I conduct research using EEG headsets, some of the key questions I have to ask participants before they start is whether they are left or right handed, because that can be a different factor, whether they are bilingual or multilingual, and also whether they play a musical instrument. Each of those three can be confounding variables which skew the results we get from the way activity happens within the brain. So it's not just about disabilities, it's there are all sorts of factors that we have to set a screen for and be aware of. Okay. This next question equally is a bigger question. As a result of being immersed in the digital age, have our brains changed adapted physiologically? We'll have to come back in about 20,000 years to answer that one, I think. Yes, of course they have. I mean, we have evolved, things are changing, but what fundamentally drives us is very old. And in terms of our evolution, these things will take generations to pass down. However, we learn those heuristics, you know, those shortcuts that we take, we learn things like that very quickly and they do start to impact on our behavior. So you sometimes hear people saying that, you know, the youth of today have got no attention span at all. Yeah, they do have attention, they just use it, they've learned to use it in a different way. So that cocktail party phenomenon I was talking to you about, we can see that that is different for millennials who are operating, they're scanning some of that peripheral information at a higher level from what has happened before. You know, we can see it behaviorally in terms of, you know, just the physics of actually, in fact, I'm going to have to confess, it was me the other day laughing at myself, someone, my parents gave me a photograph of the house I grew up in. And I, it was small and it was frustrating and I put my fingers on the photograph and tried to expand it like you do on a tablet or on a device. You know, instantly that's my go to, that's my heuristic that says if the pictures too small now do that. So these things are happening and they are changing, but these are the learned behaviors which are layered over the top of thousands of millions of years of evolution. So we won't see drastic changes in terms of the way the brain is structured, but we do see differences in terms of some of that behavior and some of the transactions. Okay, some questions around some more examples that you used, Katie. So what order was the food presented into increase healthy eating? I guess this comes from nudge. Absolutely. Yeah, great. Precisely that nudge theory. So it really is a case of establishing what it is that you want to achieve and making sure you're really clear on that. And then it's looking at the direction of travel. So what is the normal route that people take. And then ultimately the way our core part of that brain, the old brain works is it's not very sophisticated. It's not very, it's fast, it processes huge amounts of information, but it can't retain lots of it for any great length of time. So the trick is it's the beginning and it's the end. So it's the same with presentations or films or if you're writing a script for an advertisement, you want high impact at the front, you want high impact at the end, and you need to accept that what you say in the middle, the engagement level will drop. So applying that to healthy eating, it was a case of putting the really healthy options first and last and letting the other choices still be there and still be available, but actually encouraging people to walk into that cafe and pick up a banana and a yogurt or something first before they load their plate up with pasta and chips or pizza or whatever it was that they would normally get in the school canteen. So it's focusing on the beginning and at the end in a much more intentional, deliberate way. Okay. And I don't know if you can answer this question. Which of the pandemics marketing message do you think received the best response and why? Are you allowed to say? I don't think I should. The images that we've researched are the three images that were on the screen. So we didn't research all of them all the way back through. I am not at liberty to reveal. Watch this space though. Okay. Somebody asked about the change of the lighting in the Tokyo underground, was it? It was, yeah. Yep. Whether it had any negative impact on particular people that were sensitive to certain colours. The second question is around somebody said, what colour should you paint a push bike to encourage adults to use it? I guess we're thinking about Boris bikes here. And then, yes, the other question was around the Tokyo study as well. So just those two really. Certainly I'm not aware of any negatives. I mean, I know that study through reading the research and their reporting of it was very much based on applying it as a deterrent. So applying it to reduce that sort of impulsive desperate act that people undertook. They didn't report back on anything around that in terms of negative effects. So I'm sorry, I can't give a full answer to that one. So what was the science behind that particular colour then? Well, it's about wavelengths and it's about the way that our eyes perceive colour. So on the back of your retina, it's actually made up of millions of rods and cones, which are the photoreceptors that actually get triggered by an image. And that message gets sent along your optic nerve and it goes through to the occipital lobe at the back of your brain, where it is sort of pieced back together again and it makes sense of that information. So we know we don't get an accurate image of what we see in our visual field. So things like because of the way the optic the way the retina is and the way the optic fibres and the optic nerves come into the retina, there is a blind spot in all of our visual fields on both of our eyes. But we never see that blind spot in our visual field because our brain covers up that gap. It covers it up and it applies the heuristic that says just fill in that gap and that serves us really well to do that. So the brain takes information that comes in from these photoreceptors which are recorded as wavelengths and it then recollects and processes all of that information. But what it also does is the difference in terms of the wavelengths that come in actually trigger off secondary reactions within the brain. So for instance, I've said that blue is a short wavelength. The opposite end of the spectrum where you've got red, actually what you have there are very impulsive. So somebody was asking earlier about call to action buttons. Contrary to almost all popular belief red or orange call to action buttons are a great colour to have even though we think red means stop. Actually red in terms of wavelength is it's much more it's much more sort of energised and it creates that that sort of impulsive nature within us. It tends to be why you have lots of the fast food restaurants that use red as one of their colours because it actually stimulates appetite as well. So it makes you eat faster. So yeah, there's lots of different things that go on as a result of the colours that we see around us. I'm guessing in terms of Boris bikes then you know you would want to find something that stands out from the environments around it. But yeah, to me something that says, am I going to be impulsive about this decision that I'm making? Typically they tend to be green and sort of think that you're choosing it as the natural option being more environmental potentially building on the health association too. I think that would be really interesting to look into that and see what perhaps would make people select better choices for themselves. But yeah, there's a lot in colour and colour psychology and how different colours that we see make us feel. Fascinating and a whole new subject that's in its own right, I guess. Just one final question and I'm not able to ask you that there's loads and loads of questions left actually, but just this one final one point Katie. What is the one recommendation or start point we can take away from this session? I think actually I'd like to give two if that's okay. One is I'm really sorry and they're not nasty people and they don't mean it intentionally but don't trust your customers and what they say they want. If you're doing research and just relying on the responses they give you statistically that isn't going to work. And we can see that in lots of examples of products and services which are launched, which people diligently do all the research and then they fail or they crash. Or new business startups that don't survive through the first few years. So much as we've all been taught to do it over the years just asking customers what they want is not going to be adequate. Instead what I would encourage you to do is really try and home in on the emotions. So forget the rational side. If you can home in on the emotions that amygdala that will give you a far better sense of actually what's going on. And alongside that as I say just try read some read some books start researching look at what's going on in your industry and then try some split tests and see what sort of results you get. Although split tests won't tell you why you've got the results you have they will tell you what is working and which is better you know which is more successful in terms of conversions than the alternative. So that starts to give you some information which then you can piece away and see if you can give yourself greater understanding. So you can probably tell I'm an advocate I'm passionate about all of this but I would absolutely suggest have a go go and look into neuro marketing. It's an amazing field to be in and it's it's emerging within marketing and my prediction is that it's it's only going to get bigger and more significant as the technology improves. That's brilliant. Okay, thank you so much Katie really really fascinating topic. And again we've run out of time in terms of posing more questions to you but thank you very much for asking the questions that we're able to get through. Sadly that's all the time we have for our digital marketing conference today. I'd like to say a big thank you to both Hannah and Katie for their excellent presentations. And of course the CIM East of England group for organizing the conference. And you can join us for day two digital marketing conference tomorrow. We'll be back at 12 p.m. again with guest speakers Daniel Rouse and Anne Stanley. So on behalf of CIM that just leaves me to thank our speakers Hannah Buley and Katie Hart once again. And also to say a thank you to you for joining us today. We do hope that you have enjoyed the session and we look forward to hopefully welcome you again. The day two of digital marketing conference tomorrow and to our webinars in the near future. Take care everybody. Goodbye.