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Unruly Brings Emotional Targeting To Video Advertising In Japan

  • Unruly launches new targeting capability which connects advertisers with viewers most likely to connect emotionally with a specific
  • New Balance first brand to use emotional targeting in Japan; sees 113% increase in campaign completion rate, 135% increase in brand awareness

TOKYO – December 7, 2016 – 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 EQ Targeting uses data from the company’s content evaluation tool, Unruly EQ™ – created using over 1 million consumer data points – to target the consumers most likely to engage emotionally with a video, leading to increases in earned media, brand recall and purchase intent.

Academic and industry studies have repeatedly proven the effects of emotional advertising on brand and business metrics. According to a recent Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience study, ads with above average EEG scores (emotional ads) deliver a 23% uplift in sales volume versus average ads, while the Field, IPA and Gunn Report, “Selling Creativity Short”, stated that awarded campaigns (emotional campaigns) were 10X more efficient than non-awarded campaigns.

Campaigns using Unruly EQ Targeting have seen significant uplifts in campaign performance, such as increases of 74% in brand favorability and 80% in purchase intent. Launch partner New Balance is the first brand to use Unruly’s EQ Targeting in Japan for its Hellcat campaign, which saw a 34% completion rate – 113% higher than when distributed without EQ Targeting.

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

Takeshi Suzuki, Senior Manager of New Balance, Japan, said: “There are a number of interesting findings in using EQ targeting. First of all, it is important to know that people who have strong emotional responses have higher brand favorability and are greater intent in purchase products and sharing video. Unruly helped discover people who are car lovers or gamers are suitable audience to this Hellcat video that was not something we realised earlier.

“The video content was targeted more towards women, but responses from men was higher so we adopted Unruly’s recommendation to distribute to them as well. I see a potential in Unruly’s unique targeting method and it is groundbreaking that creative and media planning are integrated.”

Unruly Japan Country Manager, Haruyo Kagawa, said: “This is a transformational targeting capability for the Japanese 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 optimise 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.”

Unruly EQ Targeting, available only through Unruly Activate, Unruly’s programmatic video distribution platform, can be applied to a range of Unruly’s consumer-friendly formats. These include its skippable pre-roll format Unruly In-Stream™, Unruly-In-Article, a format which creates new video ad inventory within article pages, and its click-to-play Unruly In-Page™ format. EQ Targeting is powered by data from Unruly’s own first party data management platform, as well as third party providers, including Predix, Krux, Acxiom, Lotame and Intimate Merger (via AOL).

Unruly’s Chief Commercial Officer APAC, Phil Townend, 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 recognise 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.”

To find out more, email hello@unrulygroup.com.

UNRULY, UNRULY EQ, UNRULY ACTIVATE, UNRULY IN-STREAM, UNRULY IN-PAGE, UNRULY IN-ARTICLE and logos and associated marks are trademarks of Unruly Group. Other marks are owned by their respective owners.

About Unruly
Unruly gets videos seen, shared and loved across the open web for brands that want to move people, not just reach people.By bringing emotional intelligence to digital advertising, we help 91% of Ad Age 100 brands inform and inspire 1.44bn people around the world, using polite outstream formats on sites that people love. UnrulyX, the viewable video SSP, creates better ad experiences for consumers, improved brand outcomes for advertisers and increased revenues for top-flight publishers.

Emotion matters in marketing. Emotion creates values and sets preferences. Inspires action. Drives sales. Unruly has a decade’s data of consumer responses to video and uses that to hone content, model audiences and deploy ad dollars in ways that heighten emotional response and maximise brand impact. Unruly was founded in 2006 and acquired by News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) in 2015. With 300 Unrulies across 20 locations worldwide, our super power is emotional intelligence and our secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow.

About New Balance
New Balance, headquartered in Boston, MA has the following mission: Demonstrating responsible leadership, we build global brands that athletes are proud to wear, associates are proud to create and communities are proud to host. New Balance is the only major company to make or assemble more than 4 million pairs of athletic footwear per year in the USA, which represents a limited portion of our US sales. Where the domestic value is at least 70%, we label our shoes Made in the USA. New Balance owns five factories in New England and one in Flimby, U.K. New Balance employs more than 5,000 associates around the globe, and in 2014 reported worldwide sales of $3.3 billion. To learn more about New Balance, please visit www.newbalance.com.