Last year, Myfanwy McGregor, co-founder of Adhesive PR in Sydney, had an idea for a campaign – was there a way to measure the happiness levels that Singapore can create?

And so the agency for Singapore Tourism Board worked on a programme where it brought a team of influencers and neuro scientists with their families to Singapore and put EEG (electroencephalography) headsets on them to measure their levels of brain activity at various locations.

“We wanted objective data to review various locations in Singapore,” said McGregor, speaking at the STB Marketing Conference on the principles of storytelling.

The headsets recorded the five families’ emotional responses to 20 different activities and experiences and the visitors recorded emotions like excitement, fun, happiness, interest, stress and relaxation. (EEG works by measuring the activity of billions of neurons inside the family’s brains.)

EEG headsets were placed on parents and their children to monitor their brain activity at various locations

McGregor said the campaign gave them family-specific insights and contained some surprises – for example, it is widely believed that children do not enjoy galleries while their parents do but the experiment showed that the level of interest among children in places like the Art & Science Museum were as high as in the Zoo.

And she observed, “There’s as much stress eating a durian as there is ziplining.”

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