Decoding the Face of Advertising

If there is one development in science that is having the largest impact on the marketing world, it's the recent learning we have garnered from the field of neuroscience. Our understanding of how the human brain works has profoundly changed, and the field of marketing is starting to benefit. But more specifically, it is the world of advertising which is benefitting the most from this improved comprehension of how consumers consume marketing messages.

We have known for quite some time that emotional resonance is an important objective for all brands, and advertising is one vehicle for improving the emotional ties that consumers have with brands. Ipsos ASI has measured and quantified the impact of those emotional bonds, and we have proven that ads which elicit an emotional resonance with consumers have a larger long term impact on brand equity. Similarly, in the book Brand Immortality, the authors present evidence to suggest that ads which focus around an emotional tone were almost twice as likely (31% vs. 16%) to lead to substantial profit gains than those that tried to sell products based on rational argument.

Twenty years ago any marketer would have told you that the basic paradigm for marketing and advertising could be boiled down to a simple acronym such as AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). In those days, we assumed that consumers were rational beings, and Think-Feel-Do theories of behaviour were accepted as law. However with today's comprehension of neuroscience and how consumers make decisions, these theories have become outdated. Neuroscience now tells us that human purchase decisions more often fit a model that resembles Feel-Do-Think. As notable neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandrian has once said,

"Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons."

In other words, consumers often inadvertently act on emotions and then justify their behaviour with some type of rationalized explanation.

Until now, measuring emotions required specialized equipment and could often be cost-prohibitive and time consuming because most methodologies required respondents to be recruited to a central facility. Qualitative researchers have long known that respondents often show their emotions with visceral body and facial expressions. Paul Ekman, the recognized thinker in the field, has shown that basic emotions all have characteristics in common and that many are universally expressed through facial expressions. Moreover, these characteristics are present in every culture, so they are known to be stable and are not subject to measurement bias caused by cultural influences.

Even though Ekman's research and work on this subject was conducted as recently as 1992, it is the technological advances in online surveys along with the very recent proliferation in webcams that has allowed advertising researchers to truly exploit Ekman's work in a meaningful and cost effective way. No longer do we need to recruit respondents to central facilities to measure emotional response to a stimulus such as a TV ad, because the technology now exists to measure it as part of a regular online survey. The process is rather straightforward, with respondents simply providing consent to an application which is written to access their computer's webcam, and then the webcam records their facial expressions while watching the stimulus. The output, when aggregated across groups of consumers, becomes a second-by-second trace of the basic emotions elicited by the ad.

With this data, we are now able to provide better answers to questions that advertisers have long asked us to investigate. For example, we can more confidently answer questions such as:

• Did the ad creative connect with consumers emotionally?
• What key parts of the `creative hook' should be kept? Which specific parts of the ad did not engage?
• Were the product messaging parts of the ad engaging? Were the demos engaging?
• Were the `branding' parts of the ad engaging?

We'll be frank in telling you that while this is a very exciting development, this solution is not a panacea. There are important limitations to understand. First and foremost, we are only able to measure a few basic emotions using automated facial coding algorithms, and it is generally easier to measure negative emotions as opposed to positive. However, we have faith that the combination of positive and negative emotions expressed on a respondent's face can accurately provide an acceptable measure of overall valence, which is the term we use to describe the overall positive/negative emotional reaction to a stimulus.

More importantly, measuring emotions can't answer every question an advertiser has about their ad's effectiveness. This is because making consumers `happy' does not automatically guarantee higher ad recall and brand link. Traditional measures of measuring ad effectiveness are equally vital to measuring emotional resonance, since if the consumer fails to see the ad or incorrectly link the sponsor brand to the wrong advertiser, all we are doing is providing entertainment to viewers. For this reason, it is absolutely essential that we measure the intrusiveness of an ad and the ability for the ad to leave a memorable branded impression in the consumer's mind using more traditional copy testing methodologies such as Ipsos ASI's Next|Connect copy testing system. However, the ability to layer on emotional resonance data adds a valuable layer of analysis that would otherwise be difficult to measure.

The Ipsos ASI team in Canada is among the first in the world to start piloting these facial coding systems. Our first tests are already scheduled and we will be presenting results in a case study at a later date.