How Emotional Targeting Can Double Purchase Intent

Emotion matters in marketing. Emotion creates values and sets preferences. Inspires action. Drives sales.

These are maxims we live by at Unruly. We understand that emotion is the key to a great story. It creates true engagement with your audience, allows you to take them on a journey and make them feel not just happy or sad, but inspired, or nostalgic, amazed or warm and fuzzy.

But why should telling a good story, and evoking a strong emotional response, matter to advertisers? It turns out the two go hand in hand. Numerous studies have shown that creating emotional engagement with your audience leads to an uplift in just about every brand metric that advertisers care about.

In their 2013 study ‘The Long and Short of It’, Binet and Field found that over a 30 year period, 23% of organisations using rational or combined (rational and emotional) ad strategies reported large business gains vs. 43% of organisations that employed purely emotional ad strategies over the same time period. In 2016 Field’s 2016 Selling Creativity Short (The Gunn Report) study found that creatively awarded campaigns were far more likely to be emotional in nature than non-awarded ones, and that award-winning campaigns delivered on average 10x higher profitability than rational campaigns.

So where does Unruly come in? UnrulyEQ is a unique content testing and targeting solution that provides deep analysis of the impact of ads. Advertisers can target the most relevant audiences at scale by understanding the emotional, behavioural and cultural characteristics that help supercharge your campaign.

What is UnrulyEQ Max?

UnrulyEQ Max is a content testing suite that lets advertisers discover the full emotional and brand impact of video ads all before an ad is distributed, giving it the best chance of success.

A full UnrulyEQ Max study includes:

• Content optimisation recommendations
• A facial coding trace of participants’ emotions (opt-in up to 500 people)
• A skip score – how likely viewers are to skip your ad
• Qualitative responses – what did viewers like and dislike about the video?
• Analysis of key brand metrics and uplifts
• Cultural insights (leveraging Hofstede methodology)

What are UnrulyEQ Emotional Audiences?

UnrulyEQ Emotional Audiences are audience segments built on a custom basis for advertisers, using the findings of an UnrulyEQ Max study to identify the audience with the strongest emotional response to a video ad and target others like them.

Emotional targeting with UnrulyEQ can unlock powerful uplift on campaign metrics for advertisers. Our latest study found that people who had a strong emotional response to an ad were 3.5x more likely to watch it again and 3.5x more likely to tell their friends.

The same can be said for brand metrics too, intent to share an ad was 310% higher among audiences who had a positive emotional response to an ad, while reaching this emotionally engaged audience could drive purchase intent up by 235%!