If you are in advertising, you must be aware that capturing consumer attention in a distracted world is super hard. No matter how good your ads are, it is just tough to grab the consumer's attention as consumers' attention span is unavoidably scarce.  

Today they are exposed to numerous advertisements each day, and with it, their attention spans are waning. To be exact, an average customer gets exposed to more than 4000 ads daily. But that is not it! They also have nearly 12 alternatives for a specific product.  

So, how do you ensure that your ads rise above the noise, capture consumers' attention, and draw them in a flash? Well, creating an emotional connection is the key. But how do you ensure that your ads invoke the right emotions in your consumers?  

Emotion-driven ad testing lets you do just that.

Why Ad Testing is Crucial for both Linear TV and OTT

It is no secret that advertising is becoming increasingly expensive. But do you know that more than 500 billion dollars are spent on ads worldwide, and this number is growing fast? Well, now you do!

With so much money going into advertising, brands need solid returns on their ad spending. And to ensure that they get a good return on their ad spend, they need to connect on an emotional level with their consumers. Why? As 82% of consumers will purchase from a brand, they have a strong emotional engagement with.

So, brands must garner in-depth, granular, and emotion-centered ad insights before launching their ads. This way, they can hone in and improve their ad concepts before making them live, increasing their chances of getting solid returns on these ads spends.  

Wondering how? Well, brands need to incorporate pre-launch ad testing. When brands deploy pre-launch emotion-driven ad testing to hone their ad concepts, the likeliness of an ad gets viral through resonating storytelling and ushering in strong returns only increases.

Current Scenario of Ad Testing: Gaps and Solutions

Global expenditure on advertising has been rising over the years, but marketers are still facing issues in accurately assessing the effectiveness of the ads and the return on advertising expenditure. Given below are some of the main challenges: Lack of actionable data: Did you know that 80% of executives believe that they have a hold over consumers’ emotions? However, only 15% of consumers agree. This means there is a clear-cut gap of actionable data to back up creative decisions when airing ad campaigns. With deep ad insights, brands can argue with hard numbers which ad concepts will fare well with the consumers and record strong persuasion and engagement levels.

No scope for improvement: Without ad insights, brands cannot focus on further improvement. Yes! Your winning creative must be ticking all the right boxes, but it still might not be perfect. For instance, if a creative director focuses on copy testing, the resulting copy may be visually appealing and engaging, but if the customers do not find the messaging completely believable, the sellable quotient drops. Brands can take an already likeable copy and make it even better with ad insights, driving increased sales!  

Understanding niche responses: FGDs and other traditional ad testing methods such as surveys and feedback forms often do not help brands with decoding and segmenting responses from different audiences. With advanced ad testing solutions, brands can get responses filtered by diverse groups (for instance, male vs. female or demographics or age groups) and how they feel about your ads.

These insights can help brands pick appealing ads for specific groups or create an ad that incorporates winning elements each group likes.

Iterating while testing: Traditional ad testing approaches do not allow brands to iterate as quickly. Why? That is because a brand's capability to do so solely relies on performing agile market research with minimum spending and a quicker turnaround. Advanced ad testing solutions include frequent rounds of data collection. Before agile methodologies emerged, pre-testing often required extensive time, resources, and budget.

Today, brands can predict the virality of their ad campaigns and optimize their ad spending.

Benefits of effective ad testing  

The ad testing process is crucial for brands to get good returns on their ad spend, especially in this age of fractured attention. Ads that are not emotionally resonating are easy to scroll past by consumers without a second thought. And that is why in this fast-moving digital world, increased brands are turning to advanced agile ad testing tools to quantify and assess the potential of their ad campaigns.

As Emotion AI-centered market research platforms emerge, how brands conduct ad tests has transformed. Now, marketers can be more consumer-centric thanks to these faster, more cost-effective tools that easily meet hard-and-fast campaign timelines. With these tools, marketers can:  

• Experiment with bolder, more innovative creative add copy without the fear of airing ads that miss the mark
• Generate better attention and engagement through their ad campaigns
• Boost brand recall and align their messaging with brand equity
• Drive more conversions

Let us understand how.  

When you deploy an ad testing methodology to test, measure, and analyze your creatives- you are benchmarking. You are collating data on what works and what does not, what customers were the most attentive to and engaged with most, how different channels, including linear TV, OTT, social media, and more, accommodate your advertisement, etc.

By testing more and adding benchmarks about your creatives, you gather actionable data on how to create winning commercials based on what hit the mark before. Moreover, brands looking to air their creatives can benefit from the agile marketing research methodology. How? By testing their campaigns, they can ensure that their messaging is on-point, speaks to the target audience, and reaches them the way they want it to be.

Let us face it! Most of the marketing spend is expended during the creative production's final phase. However, iterating ad testing can be done in various phases of creative development, like animatics, storyboards, graphics, and other pre-production elements. In this way, testing at multiple phases helps brands understand how a creative is being responded to by the TG, saving massive investment on the brand's end. Here, since changes happen at all stages, the product would require limited or no changes resulting in sizeable savings.

Today's marketplace is abuzz with choices for consumers and offering what your customers want is the direct path to success. With agile ad testing approaches, brands listen to their consumers at every stage and co-create campaigns with them. With actionable intelligence about your campaigns coming directly from your target audience, brands can easily create commercials that tend to customers' exact pain points.

How Emotion AI Can Augment Consumer Market Research

Emotion AI technologies could prove a game changer for media and ad testing. Here is why. By utilizing agile media testing and leveraging in-depth emotion insights, companies can drive maximum engagement and enhance their creatives' emotional and visual appeal.

Brands can figure out which target group (TG) responds best to their creatives by comparing multiple audience groups, applying emotion-centered intelligence to segment TGs, and measuring and benchmarking the emotional responses of each TG and channel.

For instance, Entropik's self-service platforms Affect Lab is a cloud-based consumer insight SaaS platform backed by Emotion AI technology. With Affect Lab, market research and consumer insights teams can analyze and interpret media, ads, and any form of content in real-time via facial coding, eye tracking, and brainwave mapping. The platform helps brands tap into subconscious consumer behavior and know what seals the deal with consumers.

Entropik empowers brands to compare testing results with more than 45,000 tested experiences to get a clear-cut idea of how their content fares against global benchmarks. Moreover, with Affect Lab, brands can access an online panel of 60 million+ respondents from 120 countries.

Emotion AI solutions can help your marketing and consumer insights team adopt advanced, Emotion AI-powered quantitative and qualitative research methods. This way, brands can avoid turnaround delays and overhead costs associated with respondent panels.

Emotion AI solutions like Affect Lab offer 4X faster turnaround on delivering granular, actionable, and scalable consumer insights over traditional research methods. Besides, brands can couple the best of both worlds- by deriving unstated, raw, and unbiased responses via emotion recognition technologies and setting up screening, pre- and post-surveys for collecting stated responses.

Why Emotion AI-Driven Ad Testing Is the Only Option That Can Help You Cut Costs an Increase Revenue?

With the world adopting a remote-first approach, market research methods are changing faster than ever. Large-scale, consumer-focused, hands-free, and qualitative market surveys are gaining traction. To dive deep into consumers' minds and advertise in ways that appeal to their emotions, marketers are investing in Emotion AI.  

So, most marketers are keenly investing in Emotion AI platforms to detect unbiased emotions and capture real-time responses from their target groups. Emotion AI-assisted firms use facial coding, eye-tracking, and brainwave mapping technologies to get creative insights into overall ad performance, segment-wise analysis, brand prominence, message impact, brand recall, and more.

Brands can understand the emotional response they will receive, which segment is best suited for the ad, and whether appropriate elements are highlighted. This emotion-rich data enables companies to deliver impactful messages that resonate with customers, thus increasing sales.

Furthermore, with changing circumstances, viewers expect more from the ads. Catering to these demands is easier with Emotion AI platforms. New-age Emotion AI approaches allow creative insights teams to analyze multiple ads in a timely and cost-effective manner, without any order bias. That is because, in an Emotion AI ad test, participants can evaluate multiple ads in different rotation orders.

This way, brands can conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the different executions without worrying that the testing order will affect the results each time. Besides that, agile ad testing solutions fix the common pitfalls of in-person market research while delivering fast, scalable, actionable, emotion-oriented, consumer-driven insights. And naturally, brands can focus more on creative storytelling and delivering a resonating message to their customers.

Moving Onwards!

Emotion AI is the future of advertising, as all marketers want to strike an emotional chord with consumers. Though the idea of addressing what is important to people and connecting with them on an emotional level is not new, it was not the biggest priority until the disruption of 2020 happened. But now, for every marketing leader, it is super important to anticipate what people need and desire.

Brands can gain valuable insights from consumer behavior through target groups and keep their third eye open by deploying Emotion AI. Gathering behavioral and emotion data should become central to running market campaigns today.  

Brands with emotion insights that identify consumer sentiment and understand what they expect, perceive, and look for will emerge as real winners in the coming future.  

Though Emotion AI is an emerging technology, there are already dozens of use cases for Emotion AI in advertising today. With brands using this technology to test their ad creatives, test variations, improve performance, and optimize spending automatically, in real-time, and at scale.

In short, consumers' behavior is changing fast; it is about time; brands revolutionize how they think about consumer behavior, and Emotion AI is the way to go about it!

For in-depth emotion insights, tap here.

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