People choose brands they have a meaningful connection with, so emotional engagement in advertising is key to success. Find out how facial coding unlocks emotional understanding for advertisers.

Why getting emotion right matters

In all forms of advertising, it’s important to drive brand engagement, convey meaningfully different associations and drive long and short-term predisposition. People are more likely to buy from brands they have a meaningful connection with, so understanding how advertising works means understanding the emotional engagement an ad generates.

At Kantar, we test advertising with a number of different measures, designed to capture the ‘what’, as well as the ‘why’, of consumer responses. Testing advertising results in better ROI. And better-quality creative can even compensate for slightly reduced media spend. Moving an ad’s creative quality from average to best means a 32% increase in ROI. And we know that creativity is the second most important driver of ad profitability – so it’s worth getting it right.

In our survey solutions we ask a range of validated diagnostic questions about branding, enjoyment and the persuasiveness of ads, all of which can be compared to normative data. We also use a facial coding add-on, for a second-by-second time series read of emotional responses during the ad. Integrated with survey data, this is a powerful combination from which we derive actionable insights and recommendations on how to optimise the creative.