Video Ad Tech Company Unruly Brings Emotional Targeting To Programmatic Video Advertising

Unruly launches new targeting capability which connects advertisers with viewers most likely to connect emotionally with a specific ad; with Unruly’s DMP brands and media agencies can now apply emotional intelligence to paid media for the first time

March 25, 2015 – Video ad tech company Unruly today launches a new targeting capability which helps advertisers connect with consumers most likely to emotionally engage with a specific ad.

Unruly Custom Audiences uses data from the video ad tech company’s predictive algorithm, Unruly ShareRank™ – created using 1.3 trillion tracked views and over 250,000 consumer data points – to target across paid media the consumers most likely to experience a strong emotional connection to a specific video, maximizing brand recall, earned media and purchase intent.

The new targeting capability uses Unruly ShareRank data to predict which viewers are most likely to engage emotionally with a particular video ad.

In addition to custom audience targeting, video player formats and functionality are also optimized to ensure the campaign maximizes viewer engagement and earned media.

Unruly CEO Scott Button said: “This is a transformational targeting capability for the advertising industry. For the first time, brands and media agencies can use the results of content testing to apply emotional targeting to their video buys.

“In today’s frenetic, cluttered media landscape, brands that want success on social media and memorability at the point of purchase need to create and distribute contagious content that makes a deep emotional connection with their audience.

“With the launch of our emotional targeting capability, Unruly advertisers now know how, why, where and with whom their ads are resonating.  And they can use Unruly’s distribution platform to optimize their digital video distribution on a creative by creative basis to reach and engage the sub-segments of their audience most likely to respond positively to the content.”

Over the last decade, academic and industry studies have repeatedly shown the effects of emotional advertising on a variety of brand and business metrics. These include:

• Increased Sales: Emotional campaigns are more likely to generate sales than non-emotional campaigns. According to a study by Pringle & Field “emotional campaigns outperform on almost every metric”, including revenue, profit and share gain (Source: Pringle, H. & Field, P. (2008), “Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long And Prosper”);
• Increased Purchase Intent: According to Unruly ShareRank data, around 70% of viewers who experienced an intense emotional response to an ad were very likely to buy the product, more than double the 30% of viewers who were very likely to buy the product having experienced merely a moderate emotional response, representing an uplift of up to 144% (Source: Unruly ShareRank data (Feb 2013 to March 2015) n=84,000);
• Increased attention: Early results have found that Unruly Custom Audiences are around 15% more likely to finish watching a video than an advertiser’s general target audience (Source: Unruly campaign data, (2015), n=417,482);
• More earned media: Videos that elicit strong emotions are twice as likely to be shared than those that elicit a weak emotional response, according to Dr Karen Nelson-Field, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science. (Source: Nelson-Field, K. (2013), “Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing”, 2013).

Button added: “Consumers who are more emotionally engaged with a branded video are more likely to share the video, more likely to remember the brand, and more likely to buy the product. For marketers, this means more engagement, more earned media and, ultimately, more sales. Digital marketers recognize that even the highest quality content needs to be paired with a repeatable, scalable distribution strategy and that’s why we’ve mapped our content evaluation dataset to our distribution platform – we’re helping advertisers to bridge the gap between the content stack and the tech stack.”

Unruly’s Product Director Cat Jones said: “Using Unruly ShareRank data we are able to isolate the most emotionally engaged respondents for any specific video. By analysing the characteristics and attributes of that bullseye audience we can model the characteristics of the people most like to engage with a specific video.”

UNRULY, Unruly Custom Audiences, Unruly ShareRank and associated logos, designs and other marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Unruly Group Limited in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and elsewhere. Other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

 About Unruly

Video ad tech company Unruly is the leading programmatic platform for social video advertising, powered by UnrulyX, the first supply-side platform (SSP) for mobile video to offer scaled delivery of native ad formats and guarantee the viewability of premium video impressions bought via RTB.

With 3 out of every 4 video views now taking place outside of YouTube, 84% of Ad Age 100 brands trust Unruly’s proprietary video stack to reach and engage custom audiences at speed and scale across the Open Web.

Differentiated by a unique data set comprising 1.3 trillion video views and analyzing 116 million shares per day, Unruly algorithmically predicts content shareability and programmatically targets custom audiences across video, mobile and native ad formats, with guaranteed viewability and brand safety across mobile, tablet and desktop devices to an audience of 1.27 billion monthly unique users.

Unruly employs 190 people across 14 offices in 11 countries, with regional HQs in London, New York and Singapore. As well as a number of accolades recognizing its technical innovation and product quality (Digiday, Sunday Times, Braves),  the company has won ‘Best Companies to Work For’ (Sunday Times), ‘Best Digital Ad Ops Team’ (AOP) and has been named as the UK’s #2 Fastest Growing Tech Company (Deloitte). Its super power is unique data. Its secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow.

Find out more at www.unruly2018.staging.wpengine.com