Even in the contentious times we live in, dull, middle-of-the-road advertising is a non-starter for brands. There’s a reason why a study found a video of a cow eating grass was more engaging to consumers than half the ads they saw, says Jon Evans, chief customer officer of System1.
“Your biggest challenge as an advertiser is indifference,” says Evans. The research company tests ads to measure their emotional impact and predict how consumers will receive the brand message. The company released a report this year, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, which found that 50% of all advertising reviews elicited no response from viewers. That is money wasted, said Evans.
The study found that on average a U.K. campaign that evokes a neutral response forces an advertiser to spend an additional £10 million to get a result. In a market as large as the U.S., that figure could reach $100 million, said Evans. “We are basically trying to get advertisers to realize that by making a choice to invest in boring, rational advertising, you are costing yourself a lot,” he said.
In these times of tighter budgets and more accountability for results, “the earlier in the creative process that you apply the testing, the bigger the difference that the testing can make to the final output,” said Evans, “and therefore the bigger the return that you can get from the advertising, by generating the kind of emotion that will lead to business results.”
System1 tests by asking survey respondents how they feel during and after seeing an ad, and how they feel about the brand, along with what they remember about the brand and its message, rather than just poll them about their opinions on the ad. This helps create a better picture of their reactions to the message, said Evans.
“We’ve basically proven that what people feel as they watch advertising is much more predictive than what they think,” he said. Emotional advertising is twice as effective as rational advertising, said Evans: “People are a lot less interested in the features of your brand than they are in what your brand stands for and how it makes them feel,” he said.
This kind of extensive testing requires a lot of data crunching. System1 tests thousands of ads across sectors to build a database that can compare creative across many dimensions. Automation is useful in this job, but AI has shown some shortcomings in its ability to predict emotional responses, so for now, it is mainly useful in pulling insights at scale from data sets.
“We don’t think AI can replace the human element,” said Evans. “I think it’s more of an assistant than a replacement for testing.”
Automation could also help integrate large third-party data sets from advertisers to enhance their testing by adding other dimensions such as store data or media effectiveness measures. “Integrating our data into big data sets and then using AI to interrogate that, I think is going to be where the next evolution comes from,” said Evans.
Real Blowback vs. Social Media Storms
This kind of testing can help creatives sell an idea, or convince clients to stick with an existing campaign, rather than replacing it just to shake up the status quo. “Up to now, the creative departments will often have to say: ‘Trust us, this is a good idea,’” said Evans. “But by actually measuring it with the audience that it’s intended for, we can give them evidence that gives them confidence to get the money signed off and get the creative idea signed off.”
Marketers can get too close to their brand to see things impartially, said Evans. Emotional testing, ironically, gives them distance to see why the target audiences respond the way they do. “Even the best creatives in the world need to find out how their audience responds to their creative idea,” he said. “The ‘Why?’ question is critical to creative development.”
In the divisive moment we live in, testing can provide an advance warning to avoid backlash, as well as tell if it’s a true consumer response, or a social media cycle. Evans noted Google may have been quick to pull its maligned “Dear Sydney” Olympic ad when it was lambasted on social media, but System1’s testing found the ad for artificial intelligence tools elicited “only a small amount of negativity.”
Testing can put pushback into context and shape creative so it can navigate those obstacles, “and you don’t fall into any of the traps that some brands have fallen into,” Evans said. “There’s always going to be some negativity and there’s going to be some pushback from some parts of the audience, but what testing allows you to do is understand whether or not that’s significant.”
With today’s consumers increasingly choosing brands based on values, emotions are more important to build lasting brand equity, said Evans. System1’s data shows that if consumers feel positively about a brand and its advertising, they are much more likely to tell someone about it, act on it and remember it in the future.
“If you feel something, you’re more likely to remember the thing you felt. If you don’t feel anything, you’re likely to forget it,” he said. “So if you’re launching a new brand and you’re talking about features all the time, it’s a lot less likely to stick with people. But by talking about your values—who you stand for and your story—you create emotion in the product that’s much more likely to make people remember you and think about you in future. And when they’re considering buying whatever you make, they’re much more likely to act.”
System1 recently followed up The Extraordinary Cost of Dull with a new report, Compound Creativity, which quantifies how a consistent voice can be more effective than shifting messages to “freshen up” the brand. It found brands that stick with the same agencies and creative ideas experience a compounding effect over time and their advertising is 27% more effective.
“We have learned that creativity has a bigger and bigger impact the more consistent you are with it,” said Evans. The same creative actually gets better over time, evoking more positive emotional responses the more familiar that consumers are with it, Evans explained. This runs against the idea that advertising wears out, he said. “We actually found the opposite: That good advertising wears in, and the return gets better and better over time, the more consistent you are,” he said.
The caveat, of course, is that it should be good advertising, Evans warned. He noted the company study found that a video of cows eating grass beat the emotional response of nearly 50% of advertising tested.
“If you’ve got a bad idea, and a bad campaign, it remains bad,” said Evans. “But the point is: Good creativity compounds over time.”
