The Era of Ultra Processed Content
Political ads might need labels
It has been a few years since anyone has mentioned neuromarketing and its role in politics, but like learning to eat right and hydrate, we might want to start talking about this topic so we know how to watch what we consume during campaign seasons. Made to entice and satisfy us in ways we can’t or won’t admit, political messaging is now a powerful, processed buffet of offerings.
Neuromarketing sounds like it is, a way to tap into your brain. It’s used to customize experiences, to get beyond your stated desires and into the realm of your drives. Neuromarketing can watch your eyeball move across a screen and it can take readings from your skin.
Neuromarketing techniques combine science with analysis, collecting neurological data, helping researchers understand the effectiveness of their message at a subconscious level. Coupled with AI algorithms, neuromarketing can exist in the lab and increasingly in the wilds of our everyday lives. With today’s technologies, this also means that webcams, smart watches and phones can all be used as data that marketers can use to refine and target their ads. The future of neuromarketing is still emerging, which is why we might want to know more about it. Sort of like a secret sauce, we have actually heard very little of what is going into the ads that flood our lives.
In 2020 Sue Halpern profiled innovations in neuromarketing technology, highlighting some its leaders, such as SparkNeuro. In her article for The New Yorker, The Neuroscience of Picking a Presidential Candidate, Halpern spends time with SparkNeuro’s Spencer Gerrol, whose new financial backers at the time included many big names including Peter Thiel. Now existing in two divisions SparkNeuro, focuses on advanced dementia diagnosis and the original media consultancy, goes by SparkMedia. At the time Gerrol said, “So far, SPARK Neuro has never worked for a particular candidate, though Gerrol told me that he’s interested in the “potential application of our work in the political domain.”
An older, 2010 article by Kevin Randall for FastCompany, How Neuromarketers Tapped the Vote Button in Your Brain to Help the GOP Win the House, goes into ways that neuromarketing has been used in smaller political races across the USA. Some of that is also covered by Randall around the same time in a New York Times article, Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind.
There are primers available online to teach us what neuromarketing is, and there are interesting studies such as the 2019 paper, The Effect of Political Neuromarketing 2.0 on Election Outcomes: The case of Trump’s presidential campaign 2016 by Islam Mohamed Hegazy published by Review of Economics and Political Science. You can even go to LinkedIn and find pointers on Trump’s brilliant 2016 messaging and how it relates with deep cognitive triggers, brought to you by Christopher Graves, founder of The Resonance Code.
It’s now 2025 and we have yet to see a barrage of articles picking up this conversation for the electorate. I don’t know, perhaps I’m missing the dialogue. If so, please tell me where this is appearing.
I can find almost no mention of neuromarketing in the years directly leading up to our recent 2024 election. There is no mention of whether our ads were created with neuromarketing techniques. In an age where my food and even my Netflix has some warning labels, and where I insist upon them, I wonder how we are failing to inform the public on neuromarketing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I knew where the messaging came from? Wouldn’t it be useful if we understood the ingredients and testing that influenced this advertising product landing in our scrolls or on our big screens? It wouldn’t just be nice, it would be fair and transparent.
You may think this is fringe technology but you already know the names of some of the big firms that deploy this for clients across the spectrum. You can even get your brochure from a leading business school that will provide you with more information. Neuromarketing, where was it last year and where will it show up in the future? That’s all I want to know, since I like to have labels on what I consume.
