What is Emotion?

What is Emotion and how does it work in advertising?

Emotion is an amplifier. The first thing your ad needs to do is attract attention. Stand out, get noticed and remembered. But it needs to work together with the other two - Need and Brand. Otherwise, there is nothing to amplify and nothing to remember.

How do we measure Emotion?

After we have shown the creative to the respondents (video or picture), we follow up with a question about their feelings about the ad. They can choose out of five emoji icons, which cover the main arousal dimensions (intensity and valence): love, smile, neutral, boring, anger. For the key metric, we sum up the % of love and smile into the KPI of total positive emotion. We compare that score to benchmarks (learn more about benchmarks here).

To deliver a deeper understanding of emotional reaction to the creative, we also collect comments from respondents which they leave at the emoji answer. We report the main insights in the “Emotion – Quotes” part in the report.

Also, when testing a video (Impact test, Video pre-test), the respondents watch the ad and react during the course of the video with a simple like and dislike button. We aggregate the data and draw the curves of positive and negative emotions. We describe the curves’ peaks by respondents comments they left around those specific seconds.

How to get emotion right?

In the past, advertising was all about rational arguments. Now, It's all about emotion. But that is only partially true. When planning your great emotional ad, don't forget you need to plan for Need and Brand too, because all three need to be shown at the same moment for maximum effect.

Be distinctive, unexpected
We pay attention to things that differ from our expectations. If your category goes right, go left.

Rule of first 10 seconds
In the era of digital video, ad skipping and people generally being overwhelmed and annoyed with advertising in general, you need to grab their attention in the first second of your ad. Attention usually stems from a strong emotive reaction.

Exploit your emotional peak for maximum impact
While showing that cool joke or cute puppy, always make sure you display Need and Brand (such as brand symbols) at the same time.

Ad must be easy to understand
Fluency is a key element in advertising. The harder it is for the brain to process the information, the worse is the emotion. Also, it is proven people like better all things they already know.

Only positive emotions really work
Anything that creates rage or anger will not work. Remember different people perceive different things as offensive.

Strive to connect, not divide
People have the same basic needs, even the ones that don't agree with each other on the surface. Most powerful advertisement strives to connect people in a positive way.