The video showcased by Nielsen during the research session at Video Upfronts
From dancing ponies and drumming gorillas, to charity footage that really tugs on the heartstrings, it’s needless to say that advertising has a profound effect on the nation – whether we realise it or not.
But on a deeper level, beyond the laughter and the tears, how much of an impact is it really having – and how can neuroscience play a part in making advertising better?
Using new consumer neuroscience research showcased at Mediatel’s Video Upfronts event on Wednesday, Nielsen set out to show how understanding the human brain on a subconscious, granular level can help advertisers optimise video campaigns.
“Our brain likes to play tricks on us, make assumptions and take shortcuts that aren’t there in our conscious brain,” said Nielsen’s Dr. Jane Leighton.
“But we need to understand how people respond to a video stimulus, to get that really granular information on what they like and what they don’t like.”
Using EEG (electroencephalography – or recording of electrical activity along the scalp) and eye-tracking technology, Nielsen is able to track human emotional responses while viewing video content.
With a case study for an animal charity, The Shelter Pet Project, Leighton revealed that not only are we absolute saps when it comes to cute animals, but also that there are key insights that can be extracted from people’s subconscious reactions to things.
In a time where an online video has approximately three seconds to engage somebody, Leighton showed two versions of the same video to demonstrate a number of factors that affect emotional engagement.
The case study found that the video was just as effective – if not more – when Nielsen cut it down to “lose all the stuff people weren’t processing” – this amounted to chopping the running time in half, from 30 seconds to just 15.
Interestingly, only a handful of the hundreds of people in the Video Upfronts audience could even tell.
Engagement was also improved by synchronising visuals with audio to create a double sensory response – and therefore higher recall – and removing the dog from the final still in which the text appears so that the charity name received optimal attention (apparently the brain prefers engaging with faces – especially emotional faces, including animals licking enthusiastically at screens.)
“This is something that our clients find really useful – both for making ads on TV and online,” said Leighton.
“We can tell you second-by-second exactly what is happening in that video – which bits work, which bits don’t and why. And that’s what really helps us to optimise video and to make it even better.”
