NeuroFocus & Nielsen Team Up in Australia

Neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus has formed a joint venture partnership with Nielsen to roll out its services in Australia.

Nielsen is a strategic investor in NeuroFocus, which applies brainwave, eye-tracking and skin conductance measurements to track how the human brain processes stimuli like advertising, branding, packaging, pricing and product design.

Based in Berkeley, California, the firm utilizes marketing, engineering and neuroscience expertise from UC Berkeley, Harvard and MIT, to measure attention, engagement and memory retention on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis. It was founded in 2006 by Dr AK Pradeep, winner of the ARF 2009 Great Mind Award for Innovation, who is currently working on a new book called The Buying Brain.

Nielsen's Tim Rose will oversee marketing and client service for the NeuroFocus offer in Australia, and says he believes the time is right for neuromarketing in the country, as it is now more cost-effective and has much wider applications given recent technological advances.

Rose says his firm plans to market the NeuroFocus service to FMCG, automotive and telecoms clients, with considerable interest also coming from clients in sectors such as banking and travel.

'The equipment is much more manageable and easy to use today,' stated Rose. 'The sensor headsets are just like baseball caps, and they're much less obvious and intrusive than they used to be. These advances have opened up possibilities for research that haven't existed before, such as finding out how a customer really feels while they're waiting in a queue.'

The Australian roll out follows similar successful launches in Egypt, Korea and Japan in recent months.

Web sites: www.neurofocus.com and www.nielsen.com .