Understanding the power of emotional planning
Publicis’ Scott Curtis looks at how emerging tech can help brands engage with consumers on a much more human level
Emotional planning is not anything new, it’s the foundation of our industry. However, there are many inherent challenges when trying to accurately target human emotions. For starters, not everyone agrees on how best to define an emotion – with over 90 definitions being offered over the past century.
However, thanks to ongoing technological developments, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are getting better at recognising these emotions and as an industry stand on the cusp of creating and measuring ad campaigns in ways previously thought impossible. These emotionally charged adverts will resonate with audiences and provide marketers with a powerful insight into what drives us as consumers.
To appreciate the power of emotional planning, we need to bear in mind that we have rational and irrational sides to our brains – essentially – how we ‘think’, and how we ‘feel’. It’s our feelings that drive us to action. We may know that we have to do something, but if we feel a need to do something, that ultimately pushes us to do it.
Good advertising is built on this psychological understanding; urging people to want to buy a product rather than telling them why it’s a good product.
If we consider the advertising that sticks with us, it’s not necessarily the features of a product we remember but instead how these features can make our lives better. Once we’re hooked irrationally, we may then use logic to rationalise a decision, but the initial pull occurs on an irrational or emotional level.
How technology will enhance the emotional appeal
From the advent of the television to the proliferation of programmatic, technology has always shaped advertising, but until now, measuring emotion has not been on the agenda.
As it stands, we know that appealing to people on an emotional level generates better results for brands, but we are only just being able to use the technology at our disposal to measure the emotional impact and ultimately the effectiveness of digital campaigns.
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As digital has swept through the industry, we’ve gained better scientific methods of analysis that allow us to understand how ads perform, at scale and in real-time. However, for a long time, digital has been focused on measuring the wrong things, such as clicks and click through rates.
Although we can measure the effect of advertising on actions like purchases or sign ups, outside of small-scale brand study use, the effect of advertising on what people think to a product or brand is not captured – especially when a brand sells its products in a bricks and mortar store.
However, the industry is changing’ we are starting to see the proliferation of technology that enables digital marketing to become accountable and measurable when it comes to how audiences feel about the advertising. This represents the melding of the creative and scientific aspects of advertising.
For example, we have technology that can measure how emotionally charged a headline, or a body of text is. We are also seeing this migrate into video, with emotional analysis conducted within focus groups.
On the other side, we are seeing technology that can help to target our creative towards audiences that are more likely to be receptive to it, and then also to measure the effect of those ads via facial recognition.
In the future we’ll be able to go one step further with AI that will determine what content will help to elicit certain emotions. As the now infamous example of Microsoft’s chatbot revealed, AI requires a little tweaking but it’s probably not an overstatement to say we’re on the verge of a breakthrough.
On the targeting side, we are already seeing hardware such as wearables being able to measure physical responses, and software that measures facial recognition – from a smile to a frown.
The issue is that this technology exists in pockets. It is either expensive, or limited in scale or restricted to certain platforms that are unwilling to share outside their ecosystems. This is understandable, any proprietary hardware or software should benefit those who created it, but this doesn’t particularly fuel widespread adoption.
Although we’re beginning to see a convergence of these different technologies, as it stands, we still lack a single, coherent service that delivers all these insights in an easy to digest way. The marketers of the future have a huge advantage over us in that they will be able to scientifically create an emotionally powerful ad campaign and then use various tools to measure its emotional impact.
As a result, we’ll see a tranche of highly effective adverts that will pull on all the right heart-strings. This will be exciting for both the artistically and scientifically inclined members of our industry.
You think the Christmas adverts of the major retailers cause you to well-up now? Wait until they’ve been tested by AI versed in the intricacies of human emotion.
Scott Curtis is European mobile strategy and development director at Publicis Media