Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [71]
Hello, Maureen. No, sorry, my love, it’s not Tom Jones. Slap.
We have only fifty seconds left! No, love, it’s not Elton John. Slap.
Hello, Nathan! Sorry, it’s not Cliff Richard! Slap. People—think of a very famous male singer! For 10,000 pounds! He could be British! He could be American! Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.
It was mid-December, 2006, and I was sitting inside a pitch-black room, watching a TV game show pilot produced by the media giant FremantleMedia—the same company that also owns American Idol. Described on its Web site as “the U.K.’s most entertaining quiz show,” Quizmania hadn’t debuted yet in the United States, and there was no guarantee it ever would. That was where I came in—to find out if audience members’ brains could reliably predict whether or not a new and as-yet-unseen TV program would be a hit with American viewers or a total disaster.
An hour earlier, our subjects, four groups of fifty men and women carefully selected to represent the average demographic of the study, filed into the studio. Following a brief question-and-answer session with one of our team members, volunteers were fitted with their SST caps, the electrodes positioned over specific portions of their brains.
The lights went out and Quizmania got under way.
Quizmania wasn’t the only TV show that our two hundred volunteers would be watching and testing that afternoon. To ensure an accurate result, we needed additional benchmarks, or measuring sticks, to validate our results, and these we found in the form of two other TV shows, one a “proven failure” and the other a “proven success.” Half of our volunteers would be watching the failure, a makeover reality show known as The Swan. In it, two perfectly ordinary-looking women are dubbed ugly ducklings, then transformed, through plastic surgery, diet, exercise, tooth-capping, makeup, hair styling, and haute-couture upgrades into, well, swans. At which point, the viewing audience calls in and votes their favorite contestant through to the next round.
The other one hundred subjects would watch, in addition to Quizmania, a popular, highly rated TV show called How Clean Is Your House? In this half-hour-long British-made reality show, two exacting, middle-aged scolds show up at the door of an unkempt house or apartment, express outrage at its condition, and then make it over into a dream house. For whatever reason, How Clean Is Your House? had caught on strongly with TV viewers, while The Swan had not.
Massive cash! yelled the manic blond hostess, as Quizmania surged forward. Life-changing cash! Callers, we’re now playing for 60,000 pounds! she bawled, until one caller finally got it right. (Iggy Pop for those who are curious.)
Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d given each viewer a DVD of the programs in question, asked them to watch both shows, then sleep on it, in order to minimize the “novelty” effect many of us experience when we’re watching something for the first time. Now, as the room went dark, Professor Silberstein and his colleagues kept watch on a series of large computer screens in an adjacent lab. Our volunteers would have two opportunities to express what was on their minds. First, each one would fill out a questionnaire asking them how they felt about the shows they had just seen. The next step would be to peer inside their brains. When the study was over, the researchers would