CloudArmy and NeuroStrata
BY: THOM NOBLE, PRESIDENT
Published on: February 19 2018

NeuroStrata today announced a joining of forces with CloudArmy - a move that seeks to transform the ease with which system 1 insights can be accessed by clients, agencies and academics.

Science and technology are swiftly transforming the way we go about understanding our consumers. The dawn of the 21st Century heralded the first significant and tentative commercial studies in so-called neuro-marketing; months-long, big budget, hard-core fMRI and EEG brainwave studies, clinics, white-coats, magnets and electrodes. But that was then....rapid advances in both cognitive science and applied technology are what consumer neuroscience is built on and thrives on. And now, in what seems like no time at all, the centre of gravity of our industry has been catapulted out of the lab, into the home and onto the street via Laptops, Smartphones and Tablets.

What's fuelling all this? With clients pushing us ever harder for new and deeper consumer understanding, pressure for faster, more affordable, iterative and scalable non-conscious data streams has intensified. And one of the fastest growth areas we are seeing is the demand for time-response methods, especially Implicit & Fast Explicit testing approaches. The interest is coming not just from manufacturers, retailers and service providers, but from the creative industries and agencies too.

It's these dynamic forces which led us at NeuroStrata to re-think our vision and create an altogether better way to facilitate the delivery of deeper, richer system 1 insights to marketers, creatives and designers. We were on the look-out for a first-rate technology partner to help shape and deliver this game-changing approach. We are delighted to have found the perfect match with CloudArmy. They're a serially successful, N. American collective of cloud-technology specialists, rich in deep-level consultancy experience with amongst others, Microsoft and Google.

Fortuitously, we'd already collaborated with our CloudArmy partners on several innovative image-rendering optimization protocols for mobile. Kent Alstad, CloudArmy's CEO, and his partners had independently created their vision which dovetailed wonderfully with ours; a definitive, super-intuitive, one-stop platform to take automation of day to day system 1 testing tools to a new level of UX. After 18 further months of collaboration on numerous Implicit projects, we were invited to join forces.

Now, leveraging the very latest in Silicon Valley agile technology, our new CloudArmy platform, Reactor, has become a reality and offers an end-to-end capability to set up, run and analyse studies. Reactor is underpinned and infused with NeuroStrata's expertise in consumer neuroscience and is CloudArmy-architected to deliver unparalleled speed, convenience and global scalability. In line with our shared philosophy, the Reactor platform testing paradigms are agnostic and transparent - we believe in clients having open access to the data their tests generate, and we openly encourage the academic community to use the platform to explore and advance the science of implicit technologies.