What makes people like video ads

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📝 Context

Topic: Ads
For: B2C. Can be tested for B2B
Research date: July 2024 
Universities: King's College London, Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Amsterdam, University of Pennsylvania

You’re brainstorming the concept for a new video ad. The storyboard is in front of you, but you have many doubts. 

Your last ad was emotional and nostalgic and worked very well, you’re tempted to use the same emotional angle. 

However, now you’re launching a new product and feel you might need to provide people with more information about it for it to perform. Should you focus on the features and make it a rational narration instead? 

Science says, you should probably try to include both, as long as you stick to the right ad features.

P.S.: Whether you should highlight emotional or rational messaging more also depends on your product’s price. Emotional messages work best for high-priced items whereas rational messages work best for low-priced products.

📈 Recommendation

Create ads that follow these characteristics:

• Highly emotional at the start (e.g. showing a sad person encountering a relatable problem) but rational at the end (e.g. providing a solution).

• Evoke empathy throughout (e.g. narrating how the problem and the solution make people feel).

• Have dialogues (both textual and voice-over).

• Engage both sight (e.g. through zoom-ins and outs, dynamic images) and hearing (e.g. sound, music).

People will like your ad more.

🎓 Findings

• Video ads that have certain characteristics are more likely to engage people.

• Scientists scanned the brains of 113 people in the Netherlands and the US using fMRI (which measures real-time brain activity) and measured how much people subconsciously liked the ads, and why (by monitoring which brain areas activated). They found that people liked the most ads that had these characteristics:

  • Had a relevant narration (e.g. narrating a relevant issue for the audience), made people feel empathy throughout (e.g. by showing a tricky social situation) and think about theirs, or others’ wants and needs (e.g. guessing what they’d do in that situation)

  • Used dialogues, and narration with both voices and text (e.g. captions)

  • Involved both hearing (e.g. had music, sound effects) and sight (e.g. had dynamic images such as zoom-ins and outs, changes of scenery)

  • Evoked strong emotions (e.g. by showing distressed characters) at the beginning, and logic at the end (e.g. providing a solution)

• They also found that:

  • The first ten seconds were the most important in predicting whether people would like the ad.

  • Ads that made people evaluate the product (e.g. wondering if it’s a fit) had a positive effect on liking but those that made people think of numerical information (e.g. require maths to calculate the final discounted price, talk about the capacity of containers) had a negative effect

🧠 Why it works

• Some brain areas and neural activities (e.g. prefrontal cortex in paying attention, the amygdala in processing emotions) are associated with positive responses to ads.

• When ads have emotional scenes, they make us feel emotions like warmth, nostalgia, and affection.

• This makes us form positive attitudes towards the ads.

• Furthermore, when ads help us put ourselves in the shoes of others and form an opinion about an issue (e.g. through dialogues and storytelling), we feel more transported by the narration.

• This makes us like the ads even more.

🤖 Working on AI agents? I’d love to hear from you

Hey, Thomas here!

Are you building or marketing an AI agent? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My team and I are working on our 2nd collaboration with Wharton, on human-AI research (after last year’s Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots).

This time, we’re focusing on AI agents and one of their biggest issues right now: scaling adoption among end-users. Because there’s no point in building an agent if nobody will use it.

Several psychological barriers prevent people from - for example - trusting ChatGPT’s agent to decide and book a weekend away. This is what we’re investigating and aiming to solve. I expect this blueprint to set the direction for many years to come on how human-AI agent interactions will be designed.

❓ My ask for you:

1. I’d love to hear what your agent is about

2. What challenges have you seen when it comes to encouraging people to adopt your AI agent (apart from technological limitations)?

Just reply to this email, and I’ll receive your answer 🙂

We’re already receiving contributions from the world’s leading AI researchers, as well as voices like the Chief Economist of OpenAI. But I’d also love input from the smartest voice out there: you, Science Says subscribers 💪

✋ Limitations

• The study did not test whether emotions evoked by the ads should be positive or negative. 

• Only long-form videos were analyzed, It’s unclear whether the characteristics listed would work as well for very short ads where the story-telling is limited. Other research finds that ads with a total length of under 10 seconds are most effective.

• It’s unclear if the same findings apply to ads that leverage other persuasive techniques (e.g. have celebrities, are interactive).

👀 Real-life example

French supermarket Intermarchè recently launched a Christmas ad to promote plant-based eating. System 1, an ad analysis tool that checks ads for many of the elements covered in this research, studied it and confirmed its effectiveness at engaging the audience with a full score of 5 for “brand growth”.

✅ What they’re doing right: 

This ad ticks off most the boxes of effective ads according to this research:

• It engages both sight with dynamic images (e.g. different perspectives, landscape and portrait alternate, and it even changes to cartoon like images), and sound (Dialogues, sounds and music)

• It also touched on various, common, and highly emotional themes (e.g. the guilt of eating animal based food, social exclusion, family Christmas feelings), which help promote more effectively products bought for pleasure like food for holidays in this case.

• For the whole duration, it evoked empathy (by showing relevant and common issues) and allowed people to identify with the characters by clearly displaying their emotional state

• The ad is also slow, which helps highlight the key messaging of quality and the benefits of eating plant-based foods

• Finally, it introduced their main message (eating plant-based) which was the logical conclusion for the storytelling

🔍 Study type

Lab experiments (fMRI brain scans of 113  people watching 85 video ads from in the Netherlands and the US) and online experiment

📖 Research

Neural Signals of Video Advertisement Liking: Insights into Psychological Processes and Their Temporal Dynamics. Journal of Marketing Research (July 2023). 

🏫 Researchers

• Hang-Yee, King’s Business School, King's College London

• Maarten A.S. Boksem, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Vinod Venkatraman, Fox School of Business, Temple University

• Roeland C. Dietvorst, Alpha.One

• Christin Scholz, Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam

• Khoi Vo, DIRT Research Technologies

• Emily B. Falk, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

• Ale Smidts, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Remember: This is a scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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🎓 It took me, a PhD analyst, and a marketing pro 16 hours to accurately turn this 23-page research paper into this 3min insight.

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