Neuroscience for Effective Digital Strategies

A behavioral communications agency in London, HeyHuman thinks differently about people, brands, and marketing. Traditional advertising tactics and metrics are outdated; people are overloaded in social and digital content and it’s hard to parse out how people are actually engaging with content. Aoife McGuinness, Neuroscience Consultant and head of their neuroscience research lab, flips the script by helping brands nurture a new kind of relationship with their customers – through focusing on their behavior, not their words.

“I think what people say and what people do are often not the same, and I think we recognize the importance of tapping into this unconscious response to get real insight that’s going to deliver effective results,” she says.

Neuroscience allows Aoife and team to develop ways to understand how people are really engaging with content, down to the cognitive processes going on underneath the surface. HeyHuman’s approach with biosensors focuses on EEG and eye tracking for studies across advertising, UX testing, concept development, and guiding strategic ideas. Testing using these sensors (an ABM B-Alert EEG headset, and a Tobii eye tracker) helps them work through different hypotheses about their audiences. They can see how people are really reacting to their content by measuring engagement, recall, cognitive overload, and physiological responses.

The ability to combine sensors with iMotions allows HeyHuman to conduct quicker studies that deliver high quality, nuanced, and precise results that are only available thanks to the power of non-conscious responses. Aoife McGuinness therefore believes that the future of biosensors is bright for commercial settings as more and more industries see the possibilities with the technology, extending into the arts and across more academic disciplines beyond neuroscience and psychology.