The Super Bowl came and went earlier this month and while it may have been a first for the New Orleans Saints, football viewers, as usual, were witness to strings of inventive commercials that broke up the action.

This year’s ads consisted of talking babies, screaming chickens, and the typical flurry of beer and cars. While many commercials are indeed comical or emotive, it’s often a mystery as to whether or not they work. More often than not, many of us remember the gag before the product.

A writer at Wired recently sat down in his office with a number of electrodes attached to his chest, rigged up to measure his physical and emotional response while watching a series of similar commercials. With an additional small monitor strapped to his finger, the series of wires were run from his body to a fanny pack with a small PDA, transmitting data wirelessly to a laptop.

Innerscope, the company that ran the tests, had Wired’s writer sit in front of a computer screen and watch a series of video clips of cute babies, the serial killer drama Dexter, a video of himself, and images of random people dancing at a wedding. With biometric data displayed on the screen in a series of zigzagging lines, Innerscope fed the data into specific algorithms that told researchers which commercials work and which do not. By quantifying subconscious response to the videos, researchers can essentially cut out a lot of the subjective descriptions participants offer on which commercials they like, which work, and which do not.

Innerscope’s cofounder Carl Marci, director of Social Neuroscience for the Psychotherapy Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that 5 to 25 percent of brain processing is dedicated to conscious processing. “The rest is unconscious, and about half of that is emotional processing.”

So researchers are trying to tap into this vast amount of undocumented processing that influences a viewer’s reaction to an ad.

The field of studies using biometrics to evaluate human responses to stimuli is becoming more common and can also be incorporated with modern eye tracking technology to assess advertisement effectiveness. This could assist researchers like Innerscope in observing correlations in a multitude of participants’ emotional responses. Essentially, they are looking for the magnitude of increase in the biomeasurements of a test group. If there is consistent and synchronized response across a group of people, conclusions about the effectiveness of displayed ads can be drawn.

With the billions of dollars being thrown into promoting products and getting viewers to remember brands, this information proves quite useful for companies trying to get your attention amidst the back and forth on the field amongst the two NFL teams that compete each year.

How Your Biometrics Can Make Super Bowl Ads Better

Related articles:

1. Neuromarketing Eye Tracking Helps Campbell’s Soup Get a Makeover
2. Eye Tracking: A New Method for Marketers to Identify How You Really Feel About the Media You See
3. The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt1
4. The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt3
5. The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt2
6. Tracking Bias, Biometrically
7. Eye Tracking: Simple and Rational Is Better In Advertising
8. Eye Tracking to Research Nonverbal Turn Taking Signals
9. Eye Tracking Usability Studies and Self-Reported Measures
10. Eye Tracking in Visual Behavior Research Gives Marketers a Competitive Edge