After months of wrestling with thousands of post-it notes and arguing over exactly what a blow-torch might do to a chicken, 'The Experiment' is live and kicking.

Created by Wieden + Kennedy London with the help of B-Reel, 'The Experiment' is a physics-based game played in Chrome, Safari and Firefox that challenges you to place pop-up boxes in sequence. Each video window contains an object that interacts with those around it to create hundreds of possibilities and combinations. After six levels of solving chain reactions you get the chance to create your own and challenge your friends.

Have a go. Experiment. Get it wrong. Set fire to something and share it around.

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The game is one of three interactive experiences Wieden + Kennedy London is creating to support the ‘venture into the unknown’ campaign for the new 2012 Civic launch.

The campaign centres around the notion that if people never venture into the unknown, they’ll never get anywhere new. In other words, pushing the boundaries of what you know is the only way you’ll ever discover anything truly unique and innovative. Each experience teaches consumers a different aspect of ‘the unknown’ and is accompanied by a series of documentaries and films with Honda engineers.
The Experiment is now fully live, with the third and final experience due for release on 7th December.
Play the game at: http://experimentgame.com/ or find out more about it at: http://hondaexperiment.posterous.com/

There seems to be a lot of talk in the trade press recently about 'neuromarketing'. And there was an interesting piece 'advertising is a poison' in The Guardian last week. George Monbiot makes some good points in the article. At W+K we don't tend to think of our work as a 'battering ram'  of 'pervasiveness and repetition'; the people behind the likes of Go Compare may well have a different point of view.

But is advertising the cause of a society that celebrates image, power and status, or is it a symptom of this society? People have aspired to these values since they were jealous of the neanderthal with a better cave. The societies where the state has tried to enforce the suppression of these aspirations – hello, Stalin's Russia, North Korea – have in the main been pretty miserable places. It isn't just advertising that makes humans want a bigger house and a new car.

Since the publication of Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, academics have been suggesting that advertising has the power to manipulate the subconscious. But it's pretty rare that an agency team will have a conversation with clients about neurobiology, or how our message will be processed by the prefrontal cortex of our audience, or how we can conceal some sort of secret mind-control message in an ad. It's just not that scientific or simple. We wouldn't deny that advertising has the power to manipulate the unconscious mind. But pundits overestimate our ability to control or predict how we're doing it.

Meanwhile, it's ironic that Monbiot suggests advertising is to blame for low savings rates by UK families when at the bottom of the article there is an ad for… Barclays Investments.

In Marketing magazine this week, Dr AK Pradeep 'one of the world's leading neuromarketing experts' says, "One of my clients trying to sell milk experimented with various imagery – farms, grass, hay, barns farmers…The one that always wins out is cows. Somehow the source of a product is more evocative in the deep subconscious than anything else. This is something we've learned through neuromarketing."

So, what about cats with thumbs, as featured in our highly successful campaign for Cravendale milk then?

Our view: the difficulty with showing cows or talking about the other familiar benefits  listed above by Dr Pradeep is that it gives the audience immediate permission to ignore you because they assume you're telling them what they already know. But something dissonant and unexpected like a polydactyl cat slaps you across the face (not literally, we don't yet have the technology to make that possible) and makes you pay attention in a way you wouldn't have done otherwise for such a functional product. An 8% sales increase suggests that this approach has merits.

Of course, perhaps if we had done a campaign featuring cows with thumbs, we would have sold even more milk.