Editor's note: Charles Young is CEO of Ameritest, an Albuquerque, N.M., research firm. This article appeared in the May 10, 2010, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.
The six-minute video of Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent is a paradigm of the power of emotional engagement. Boyle's appearance on the show and her subsequent launch into international stardom provide an opportunity to study this film as an instantly-familiar case history that can illuminate several general principles about how advertising works - namely how negative preconceptions and the element of surprise offer advertisers an inroad to changing consumer perceptions and using that shift to build an emotional, meaningful brand message.On a media level, the Susan Boyle story dramatizes the synergistic effects of cross-platform engagement, combining exposure on a popular television program with the virality of Internet videos - supercharged with the PR of dozens of news programs covering the phenomenon. But on another level, this is about the power of film to tell a compelling story and demonstrate the kind of film all advertisers aspire to create.
Three important lessons immediately came to mind. First, the visual story told in the video demonstrates the role that negative emotions can play in creating drama, which is an important creative option to understand for any advertiser who wants to magnify the emotional impact of a brand communications strategy. Second, this video illustrates the process by which meaning is created in film. Of course, imbuing ordinary products and services with meaning is the essence of building a brand. Third, it has a lesson to teach about the psychological phenomenon of increasing engagement with repeated viewings - something many ad researchers these days have come to question, even as to whether it actually exists. To learn the lessons the video has to teach, Ameritest conducted an online test am...