In 2007, Kerry Collinge, who works in marketing, found herself working on an unusual project featuring a drumming gorilla.
The TV ad was for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, and the gorilla, or rather an actor dressed in an extremely convincing gorilla suit, plays the drum solo to the Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight.
It was an immediate hit with viewers: sales of the chocolate skyrocketed and the ad went on to be voted UK favourite.
At the time the announcement was made, Ms Collinge was a senior figure in Cadbury’s internal marketing team. But as she explains, the finished piece may never have seen the light of day.
“The ad sat finished in-house, inside Cadbury’s, for nine months before someone published it,” he says.
Initial market research had suggested that the ad would not play well with customers. After all, a drumming gorilla has nothing to do with chocolate.
However, Collinge and his colleagues were convinced that it would be a success. So he turned to a London-based high-tech advertising testing company called System1 to get a second opinion. His online system doesn’t ask participants if they like a particular ad.
Instead, ask at least 150 people to view the ad and record their emotional responses: the drumming gorilla scored extremely positively. Mrs. Collinge reported this to Cadbury bosses, and the ad was launched to great acclaim.
“I used the tests to give Cadbury confidence that the ad was going to do a fantastic job,” he says. “Because it was very, very different for them.”
It takes a foolhardy person to claim that they are not influenced by advertising. In today’s digital world, time comes to you all the time, and the amount of money companies spend advertising their products and services has never been higher.
This year, global ad spend will reach $706 billion (£527 billion), according to a study. That represents an increase of $634 billion in 2019, and digital advertising (ads you see or listen to on your computer and mobile phone) now accounts for 62% of the total.
However, the problem for brands is clearly summed up in this quote from American auto industry pioneer Henry Ford: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the problem is I don’t know which half.”
To try to ensure that ads are as successful as possible, retailers are increasingly using high-tech ad testing companies.
UK firm Kantar is another firm working on these analyses. Its online testing system also focuses on a person’s emotional response when an ad is shown to them. One way to do this is by connecting to a tester’s laptop or webcam and then using facial mapping software to monitor their reactions.
Jane Ostler, executive general manager of media and creative products at Kantar, says that this type of more sophisticated testing is in growing demand.
This change is due to the fact that companies want to advertise their products on a large number of platforms: press, television and social networks. These various media may require a different advertisement for the same product.
“I think for customers, that’s the real challenge, not just making it [the adverts] everything, and make it all integrated and part of the same campaign, but also how to measure it and if it’s working,” he says.
Ms. Collinge now works for System1 as Director of Marketing and Partnerships. The system asks raters to reveal their emotional response to an ad, while it’s playing, by clicking on the relevant small graphic of a human head on their screen.
Each of these images shows a different emotion, with that emotion also written below. The options are contempt, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral.
“We don’t want to ask people what they are going to do [whether they will buy the product or not]because we know that’s not very predictive of how an ad is going to work, because people go into their left brain and start overthinking,” says Ms. Collinge.
“Instead, we want to measure what their natural feeling is, what their natural emotion is, what all those basic emotions are. We can get a snapshot of what parts of an ad are working or not working.”
The ultimate goal is for customers to get accurate short-term and long-term sales predictions, and additional metrics like finding out whether or not the company’s brand is recognizable and familiar to customers.
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Priyanka Carr, COO of US software company Momentive, says the benefit of using online ad testing is that it’s cheaper than in-person testing or market surveys. (Momentive also owns another online ad testing provider: SurveyMonkey.)
“It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of dollars to run an ad test [as it could do previously]says Ms. Carr. “Now it takes tens of thousands of dollars to run a big ad test, and you can do it early in the process. That’s a big differentiator.”
One such online evaluator is Nicole Cheong from Johannesburg. She recently reviewed an alcoholic beverage advertisement that included wheelchair users, but she felt the survey questions were a bit suggestive, which probed her reaction to people with disabilities in the advertisements.
“It was a nice and moving story, but it didn’t resonate with the product for me,” he adds.
System1 says its prices start at around £2,000 per ad, while fellow online ad tester Toluna says its prices can be as low as 5% of an ad’s campaign budget.
But if brands can now test their ads more thoroughly than ever before, what makes a good one in the first place? How can a retailer and its advertising agency dream of the next ‘drummer gorilla’?
Psychologist Stuart Duff, from UK business coaching firm Pearn Kandola, says that if brands want to reach customers, hope is the emotion they need to focus on.
“Emotions are fundamental to our memory,” he explains. “We don’t easily remember factual or bland information, but something that is poignant or uncomfortable will be easily memorized. What are the three most powerful emotions? I would suggest fear, guilt and hope.
“Hope is associated with feelings of joy and relief, and offers an outlet for fear and guilt. It is hope that will move us forward and trigger feelings of trust in the product.”
Additional reporting by Will Smale, New Tech Economy Series Editor.
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