“Seize the moment” is good life advice, but also a good directive for marketers looking to make an impact. This is especially true in a crowded TV landscape, where free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) is booming; marketers need to pay more attention not only to where and when their ads show up—but also the mood the program puts a viewer into, to make the best use of their TV spend, said Peter Crofut.
As consumers increasingly turn to free, ad-supported streaming, those non-skippable ad pods become more important and the targeting needs to sharpen and become more mindful of its context, said Crofut, VP, business development, agencies and brands of Wurl. The connected TV company Crofut describes as “the tech behind the big-name TV brands” uses artificial intelligence to sort out the emotional context of CTV programming in order to match ads to the mood of the viewer.
The emotional context where a spot shows up can make or break its message, says Crofut. Wurl’s data shows that when the sentiment of an ad matches that of the programming immediately before the ad break, it can drive performance, he said.
“We see 2-3X lifts consistently, “ Crofut said. “It’s really important, when you have that user in their emotional journey, to understand where it is, and then be able to really show the user that you understand where they are emotionally, and connect.”
Most streaming platforms know who is watching what content and when, said Crofut. The recommendations that follow each program show that, but what they are missing is the “subcontent”—the mood and emotion that film or TV show evokes in the viewer, he explained.
“We found the strongest correlation to ad engagement occurred when the emotions of the scene just before the ad break match the emotions in the ad creative,” he said. “When you get it wrong, then you’ve wasted that investment.”
Crofut noted that Wurl is one of the largest operators of FAST channels, handling ad insertion and content distribution for premium free streaming. That connection and its relationship with its parent, the tech company AppLovin—gives it access to information on the content airing on those platforms that it can use to break ads out of targeting by demographics or dayparts.
“We’re really poised to solve one of streaming TV’s biggest challenges, which is not only attracting more demand, but trying to figure out how to close the gap in performance,” he said, to “make streaming TV more relevant, engaging and profitable.”
Making those connections can be tricky, because the way most programming is organized follows taxonomies that can miss these nuances, said Crofut. As an example, he said most advertisers would consider an animated movie like Shrek a safe brand environment, but an ad for baked goods could play differently if placed after the movie’s villain tortures the Gingerbread Man.
“Do I want my ad five seconds after that scene? Probably not,” said Crofut.
Mismatches cannot only result in wasted advertising dollars but can also trigger negative sentiment, said Crofut. He recalled recently watching his teenage son and his friends become irritated at being shown an ad for diapers they couldn’t skip while they were trying to watch a sports program. The boys eventually tuned out the program and switched platforms to watch something else.
“They put in some healthy amount of pejoratives,” said Crofut. “Now the brand created negative attention.”
The Wheel of Emotions
Wurl uses Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, a visual device created by psychologists to organize emotional responses in relation to each other. Like a color wheel combining primary colors to create new shades, Plutchik’s wheel takes eight basic emotions and mixes them in various combinations and degrees of intensity to predict the sentiment that will result.
Thanks to AI, Wurl can apply that model to programming in order to score the content and predict what emotions it will generate in the viewer, and score the creative the same way, so that it can then match content and advertising messages.
“I think of it like a virtual couch surfer who knows where those emotions best fit within the programming, so that you can marry those two to drive better performance,” Crofut said.
Emotions can also combine to create a different, unexpected mood. Crofut recalled recently working with a quick-service restaurant chain on A/B testing that not only found the ads that were put through the scoring system tested better, but it found certain combinations of emotions were useful. For example, the combination of joy and anticipation was a precursor to hunger—a useful bit of intelligence for a restaurant chain.
This kind of targeting can “democratize CTV and open more budgets,” said Crofut. It helps clients build a good brief for creatives, who now have a better idea of what works to move consumers, and what to avoid. Going beyond audience targeting in premium content to targeting premium moments still requires a lot of testing and iteration, but the technology continues to evolve, he said.
Leveraging this work requires an educational effort targeting marketers and agencies, said Crofut. Luckily, the measurements enabled by this data can help tell a story “to re-educate them about including this in their arsenal, as it were, and making sure the pipes exist for that to happen,” he explained. The performance data available demonstrates how this targeting improves results, which speaks to the profitability and incrementality that are the “love language” of CFOs and boards, he said.
This data poses a challenge for creatives: to use the information to make more emotionally engaging and relevant ads, said Crofut. “Creative gets a bigger seat at the table with this, because we have more data in a granular way to provide them, to think about telling better stories,” he said. With this capability, creatives can build up their profile and their learnings, backed up with measurable results, he said.
“Here are all the emotions and the context which actually help performance,” said Crofut. “This opens up new avenues for creatives to tell better stories that resonate and connect emotionally.”
