The Drum: Why does a media agency need neuroscience?

Kelechi Nwankwoala, research lead at Mindshare neuroscience unit NeuroLab, explains his role. Read the entire piece at The Drum.

When I was in college I studied biology with a heavy neuroscience focus. I was really interested in neuroscience by the time I left, but I also studied creative writing. I have always been interested in this intersection between art and science and how we can start to use the tools of science to better understand what people like, what they don’t like, or how they’re reacting to things. I think that’s a question that’s relevant to both the arts and sciences.

I had heard about the NeuroLab and it felt like something that was perfectly aligned with my interests. I joined as a junior researcher, pretty much directly out of college at Johns Hopkins, and I’ve been the research lead for the past one and a half years.

On our team, I’m the person who is responsible for the core research tasks. My duties are focused on all the research tasks: figuring out what the study design is, doing the analysis and presenting that back to clients and being the face of the research from beginning to end.

When we start talking to clients, they might have questions about whether or not there is science behind a given strategy. I’m the person who will guide those discussions. I’ll start to ask them questions that relate to something that we can measure or guide us toward an experiment. I’ll do additional research to look at what the existing literature says. And I’ll craft the study design and a proposal if we feel we need additional research to understand that.

We do a lot of projects that are very specifically client-focused – a client comes to us with a question and we put our heads together to answer it. But we also like to do research that leads clients towards what we find interesting, rather than just following the wave.

Read more at The Drum.