Editor’s note: Karl Rosenberg is senior vice president at MSW Research. He is based in the firm’s Lake Success, N.Y., office.

Ever notice how most successful salespeople are the kind of people you just feel good about? I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Let’s face it: Most of us don’t really like being sold to. Unless we have a pressing need, it’s not an experience we seek out in our lives. Yet every now and then we find ourselves engaged by a salesperson and for some reason we become willing to set aside our usual habits and consider a change even though we have no apparent need to change. When this happens to me it’s almost always because of something I’ve felt rather than something the person said.

Great salespeople have that uncanny ability to quickly make a relevant connection with us, to make us comfortable with being sold to. We feel like we’re going to get something valuable out of the encounter. And this is almost always based on an emotional judgement we make early on or a feeling we have about the person. “He seems like a nice enough guy. I’ll give him a listen.” Or, “She seems enthusiastic. I wonder what her story is.”

Making an emotional connection is as important in effective television advertising as it is in personal selling. After all, as Fairfax Cone said, “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.” Much of what works in personal selling can be applied in principle to creating sales-effective advertising.

But in practice, advertising faces a huge disadvantage that one-on-one selling does not face. In a one-on-one situation the salesperson knows whether they’ve made that connection or not and can adjust their behavior and messaging on-the-fly based on feedback (verbal or nonverbal) from the target audience. An ad on the other hand is a one-way communication. How can an ad “know” when it has made that critical emotional connection? This is where advertising research comes in.

Our firm has developed a system to give advertisers feedback about consumers’ response to an ad. It was designed to give the full picture, including the emotional response to the ad as well as more traditional communications measures. Hence we call it Whole Brain Diagnostics. In this article we’ll take a look at the role of emotion in effective advertising and look at techniques we employ to measure the emotional response to advertising.

Emotion’s many roles

We can think of many different roles that emotion plays in making advertising effective:

  • Attracts and holds the attention.

There are more ways to reach consumers today and it seems that it is actually harder than it used to be to attract and hold their attention. With the advance of the Internet consumers have become more media savvy and exercise more control over the media they are exposed to. This has placed greater demands on advertisers to make their messages more engaging to consumers. Emotion clearly plays a key role here. Our brains are hardwired to attend to certain emotional cues on a primitive level so those cues can often get through to an otherwise disinterested viewer.

  • Makes a personal connection.

Beyond attracting viewer attention, emotion can actually make a message more valuable to consumers. When an ad strikes a chord with us or when we can relate to a situation or character, we feel that our attention to the ad has been rewarded. That’s a good thing for the brand serving up the message. On the other hand, when an ad fails to reward our attention with something relevant and meaningful we can feel in a sense deceived by the ad.

It’s obviously not enough to just use emotional triggers to reach out and grab viewers; advertisers have got to then deliver something of value to the viewer, or risk disappointing the customer. At one time or another we’ve all been sucked in by a gimmick and then said to ourselves, “Why am I watching this?” Not the response we’re looking for in today’s on-demand world.

Just by making that personal emotional connection, advertising delivers something of value to the viewer. It acknowledges, as Morris Hite did, that all advertising is in the end personal communication: “There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and personal. It’s one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching TV in the den.”

Emotional cues can help us relate to the ad’s characters or situation, making us feel that, like a good salesperson, the ad is talking directly to us personally.

  • Builds brand equity.

Building brand equity is all about building positive connections between your brand and the consumer. Emotion clearly plays a role here as well.

  • Creates a buzz.

When people really connect with advertising that delivers an exceptionally rewarding experience, some will want to share the experience with others, creating a word-of-mouth buzz. As the number of interpersonal communication channels available expands (picture phones, instant messaging, blogs, etc.) opportunities abound. But what motivates buzz? Most likely, it’s something emotional rather than rational.

As neurologist Donald Calne has said, the difference between reason and emotion is that reason leads to conclusions while emotion leads to actions. In the final analysis this is the most important role of emotion in advertising: it gets people to act.

This simple truth is borne out by the experience of another great ad man: “You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.” (William Bernbach, quoted in the book Bill Bernbach said.)

Measuring the emotional response

While nearly everyone agrees that getting an emotional response to one’s advertising is a good thing, there is far less agreement on how to detect if such a response occurred. Indeed many have even argued that it is not possible to accurately measure an emotional response or believe that the very act of questioning itself distorts the true response.

Over the years, our firm has investigated measuring the emotional response to advertisements (Figure 1). Early on, our efforts focused on finding a direct, physiological measure of emotional response. Working with partners in the academic community we connected respondents to every device imaginable. In the end however, these systems just did not yield reliable and reproducible results. Often, testing the same ad twice would yield widely different results. Non-verbal response scales, on the other hand, have consistently yielded more practical results and this is the approach we take today in both our adult- and child-testing systems.

A study of emotion in advertising

Recently, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) came together to showcase the work of research companies using methods to detect the emotional response to advertising. MSW was asked to contribute.

Four television ads from four different brands of beer - each known to have produced positive business results and each employing different means of making an emotional connection - were selected for testing by the AAAA. MSW put the four beer ads through our AD/insight Whole Brain copy test system.

Our Whole Brain Diagnostic Suite was designed to render a clear picture of how viewers respond to a test ad on emotional as well as rational levels. The system provides feedback both about how deeply the ad is processed and about how key mental modalities are engaged by the ad (Figure 2).

Television ads are linear events. One scene follows the next. However, the way we process ads is definitely non-linear. As we watch an ad we process it on several levels simultaneously and all levels interact with one another continuously. Attention activates our faculties. Our “left brain” semantically processes the messages while our “right brain” gets a feel for what’s going on in a more holistic way. The two come together to synthesize some sort of meaning. If it’s relevant meaning, then attention may be turned up a notch to process more deeply, perhaps relating our stored personal experiences to what we’re seeing and processing the stimulus more deeply. Then of course, any or all of this may or may not be connected and integrated with our existing image of the brand depending on how the ad plays out in time and how deeply we process all this information.

This is undoubtedly a gross oversimplification. But it reminds us just how much is going on before we come along and measure recall and persuasion and explains why creative teams can be disappointed with copy tests that only report persuasion and recall scores.

Four ads were tested for the AAAA/ARF project:

  • Budweiser “Whassup” (:60)
  • Bud Light “Ice” (:30)
  • Miller Lite “Each Hand/Tastes Great” (:30)
  • Heineken “The Weasel” (:30)

All the ads had aired and were known to have been effective. Therefore, assessing the sales potential of the ads was not at issue. The study’s objectives were more about understanding how the emotional response to these ads drove sales.

Our Whole Brain Diagnostics reveal the impact of emotion on two levels. First, we examine how emotional cues contained in the ads govern the amount and depth of processing that respondents allocate to the ads. And secondly, we examine the processing modalities that were engaged by each ad, revealing the extent to which an emotional connection is made.

Attention is the mechanism by which we control how much mental energy is given to process each of the dozens of information channels that both impinge upon and arise from within our brain. It is that essential mental capacity that puts us firmly in control of our environment and not the other way around. Philosophically, it is at the heart of individuality and free will. And from a marketing perspective, it’s why the consumer is boss. And in the end it is the consumer who chooses which brands to attend to and which brands to buy.

While most philosophers and psychologists agree that if we are in control of anything in this world it is our attention, those same thinkers would also admit that over the millennia our attention has been “educated.” Emotion has played a key role in this education process. Studying how the attention tracks over the course of an ad gives us a window on the emotional response that is taking place in the mind of our target.

Take for example the “Whassup” ad from Budweiser (Figure 3). Things start rather slowly until - you guessed it - that first “Whassup!” comes. Then things take off and stay up throughout the remainder of the ad. Our 21-35-year-old beer drinkers got into it. Bear in mind these ads had been seen before and there is likely some “delighted recognition” going on here. Some may be thinking, “Oh wow, this is that ad!” It was an enjoyable experience when they last saw it so they tune in for the reprise. Nevertheless, the lift is there and it carries the attention all the way through to the branding scene at the end, “True.”

Interestingly, “Whassup” produced a bimodal response (Figure 4). There were those who got into it - the ad made that personal connection - and those who did not. We saw clear differences in the depth of processing among those who were “persuaded” by the ad to allocate a greater share of drinking occasions to Budweiser versus those who were not “persuaded.”

When we layer our measure of emotional valence onto the Attention Trak data we see that this step-change in attention is associated with positive emotional feelings - camaraderie perhaps? Ads that succeed at making that emotional connection rarely connect with everyone. When an ad produces a polarized response it’s important to know who the ad connected with so that subsequent efforts can focus on other important segments that may have been left out.

We’ve also seen how negative as well as positive emotional triggers can attract the attention. The track for Bud Light “Ice” is much different however (Figure 5). It has more of stair-step pattern. The strength of this brand story is that it just keeps building from beginning to end.

Clearly, there are key emotional drivers along the way at each step. These are the scenes our guys found particularly “relevant” and they drew them deeper and deeper into the story. First at second 6, when the coach is giving that enormous guy with the great face an earful. Then again around second 15, he’s back again and the tension builds until finally, when you thought he’d never leave, relief at last, and it’s party time!

What 21-35-year-old male can’t relate to this situation? Whether it’s the coach or the boss or even dad, each has gotten an earful at one time or another and lived to deal with the emotional response. Interestingly, these early scenes evoked overwhelmingly negative emotions yet they drew respondents into the ad instead of driving them away.

Ah, but endurance has its rewards. At second 20, the tables turn and attention climbs even higher. This scene was associated with the most positive emotional response.

In case you were wondering if all ads show this generally upward pattern of increasing attention, there’s the Miller Lite case. This ad was selected because its approach was primarily rational and not emotional. Not surprisingly, the Attention Trak for the Miller Lite ad is essentially flat (Figure 6).

Once again however, it pays to look beneath the surface (Figure 7). This “low carbs/great taste”-focused ad produced a polarized response, finding its mark only among those guys looking to lose their love handles yet keep their world-class beer. The rest of your typical 21-35-year-old beer drinkers couldn’t have cared less. You can be sure that Miller has something else in mind to capture the other guys...as did Heineken with its classic, guy-beer-girl, formula (Figure 8). Notice how the scenes associated with a positive emotional response are also associated with increased attention and engagement with the ad.

 Emotional connection to the brand

The beer ads demonstrate emotion’s central role in engaging consumers. They also show that both positive and negative emotional responses can engage the attention.

Beyond engaging consumers in the ad, an emotional response to an ad can enrich the brand’s meaning to consumers and build brand equity. Our Whole Brain Diagnostics measure the extent to which an ad is being processed emotionally as well as rationally. Each ad leaves its own unique neural signature, as revealed by our depth-of-processing spider maps.

The maps summarize commercial and brand perceptions among those who were persuaded by the ad versus those who were not. They give us a picture of both how the ad was connecting with the viewer and which of the connections were driving persuasion.

The processing map for “Whassup” shows that there was very little verbal message processing going on among viewers of this ad. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing happening. Quite to the contrary, viewers were highly engaged, as we saw in the Attention Trak for this ad. What’s happening is that “Whassup” is being processed more holistically in both the Creative and Emotional quadrants. Viewers are being entertained and most are making an emotional connection either because they can relate to the characters or they’re able to participate in the good feelings of the moment. The ad delivers something of real value to the viewers - camaraderie.

 The payoff comes in the Brand quadrant - the thickest band and source of the ad’s selling power (Figure 9). The viewing experience is not only positive and rewarding it is connected to the brand. The brand plays a central role in this wonderfully engaging “life is good” story: havin’ a Bud; life is good; true, true.

The processing map for the Miller Lite ad is very different, as seen in Figure 10. The verbal Message quadrant is where the action is for Miller Lite. This is a classic message-oriented ad that delivers believable and differentiating new news about the brand. Can this more cognitive approach make that important emotional connection as well? Yes it can but obviously in a different way. Good thoughts can evoke an emotional response just as compelling visual and situational cues can. There’s more than one way to make that emotional connection. On the Miller map we can see that those who were persuaded by the ad were left with an overall “good feeling” from watching the ad. Why? Perhaps because they learned something valuable about the brand that is relevant to their personal lives - lower carbs in a great-tasting beer.

Difficult to make a connection

The television medium is not as compelling to consumers as it was 20 or 30 years ago. It is more difficult for advertisers to make the personal connection that truly builds brand meaning through television, given the increased clutter, changing viewing habits and alternative entertainment channels available.

To maximize the economic value of television today, managers must change the way they think about how to use the medium. A new model is evolving among advertising thought leaders that is replacing the old AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) flowchart. Our new view is that television is a channel through which we can deliver value to consumers rather than a channel through which we simply deliver one-way communication. The new model focuses more on constructs of engagement, enjoyment and enrichment of brand meaning rather than old ideas of recall and communication. In the end the objective remains to persuade, sell more of our brand and build stronger brand relationships. But how we consistently achieve this payout must be rethought if we are to maximize our return from today’s television investment.