• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, March 22, 2011

Marketing research firm Ipsos has partnered with Innerscope Research to meld biometrics research, which tracks emotional engagement with advertising, into a slew of its products.

Ipsos said that to start, biometric techniques will be melded into the Ipsos ASI AdLab. That will allow for quantitative and qualitative insight and "real-time in-depth insights on unconscious emotional response."

Ipsos said it is looking to upgrade its products by "leveraging the insights from the existing product with the additional power of the biometrics."

The Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange, an R&D arm, is leading the process.

"We set out to find a partner with a method for measuring unconscious consumer response that would complement our longtime focus on emotion," stated David Brandt, a top executive at the Thinking Exchange. "Biometrics offers the best way to do this and Innerscope ... (is) highly validated by academic literature and industry studies and offer(s) a technology that we can scale globally."

Innerscope uses a sensor belt to monitor skin sweat, heart rate, respiration and movement -- all indicators of emotion. It says it then turns the results, sometimes with the integration of eye tracking, into actionable insight.