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June 21, 2022 | Authored By
Do you know what parts of an ad campaign truly ignite your customers? Is it a beloved celebrity? Or a compelling story? Don’t we really want to know if a great, emotional ad gets the proper credit when we measure campaign performance?
As a publisher, NBCUniversal knows how important the role of emotions can be. Emotional relationships to our content are what fuels fandom. It’s why we constantly test our content to understand feelings like brand love, because emotional connections with our fans can have tangible benefits for brands. And the same kind of rigor publishers apply to premium content needs to be applied to the quality of the ads as it runs alongside it.
That’s why, as part of #OurPartnershipCommitment, NBCU is creating a new certification for emotion and ad quality, as a category within our audience measurement framework. Because marketers should be able to see—and transact on—the results of great creative and measure ad campaign impact on every level. And there’s no better place to start that conversation than at Cannes Lions.
Transacting on impact will require a comprehensive understanding of several variables on both sides of a campaign, including the quality of both the content and advertiser’s creative. And while brands spend a ton of time testing before an ad airs, right now, publishers are held accountable for driving results once it does, often only defined as maximizing reach.
But now thanks to new measurement solutions, we believe ad campaign impact can be a shared responsibility. We are exploring how we can value ad quality—and embrace accountability—across the board, and connect the emotions ads create with the content to the impact it generates. Take, for example, a company like Dumbstruck. By combining insights from psychology with cutting-edge facial coding and eye tracking AI, Dumbstruck is building the future of emotional analytics. Already, their creative tools and testing have effectively elevated messaging for brands. Now, we’re testing and learning with Dumbstruck to further prove the relationship between the audience’s emotional response to a specific ad and its in-market performance—and, by extension, open new pathways to not just understanding creative’s true impact but transacting on it.
And they’re not alone. There are countless others working in this area, from System 1, to Emoto.AI, to Kantar’s Link Ad Test, and Dynata’s Ameritest to name a few—all of which are championing this kind of measurement. And so, we’re working with measurement partners across emotion and impact to build a scalable model for creative testing that evaluates the emotional resonance of creative and seeks to illustrate the tangible contributions of creatives that drive in-market performance. With their help, we’ll be able to measure the correlation between the creative choices and media placements that advertisers make and their ability to generate business outcomes.
In this era of new currencies, we need multiple trusted yardsticks that can measure ad campaign impact in its entirety—from emotion to content to conversion, and everything in between. And by working together, and exploring new ideas, we can develop a new system of creative testing and measurement solutions that scale impact measurement and make it accessible to all our partners. Talk about a collaborative, creative moment worth celebrating.
