How people decide.
APAC markets are often seen through the lens of e-commerce and m-commerce, from China’s blockbuster Singles Day to Korea’s hyper-connected consumers. But even the most advanced commercial technologies can’t escape from the basic facts about human thinking and psychology.
Human beings have evolved to make “fast and frugal” decisions. A choice we can make quickly, with minimal effort, with a “good enough” outcome, is preferable to a choice which demands careful consideration or weighing of unfamiliar elements. Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman have come to call these rapid, semi-unconscious decisions “System 1 thinking” (as opposed to the slower, more considered System 2 thinking we employ when we tackle calculations or consider complex choices).
For most decisions made by most people, System 1 dominates, with the slower System 2 acting as a rarely-used brake on these impulses. Brands that respect and speak to this rapid System 1 decision-making will prosper. In practical terms, consumers are creatures driven by top-of-mind preferences, by emotional response, and by rapid pattern recognition. Focusing on those basics will make brands easier to buy, and hence stronger.
Long-term branding in an instant world
But there’s a paradox involved here. For all that we live in a world of mobile ads, direct marketing and short-term impacts, the fundamentals of brand-building happen over the long term. Top of mind preferences, emotional response, and pattern recognition take time to create and time to change. Those fast and frugal decisions are often the result of years of product experience, purchase habits, and patient brand-building.
This is why emotional communication, on any channel, is so important. Emotional advertising helps create positive associations with brands – long-term memory structures which are activated when the time comes to make a choice. As Kahneman put it, “the answer to a simple question – how do I feel about it? – is the proxy for the answer to a far more complex question – what do I think about it?”. Or to put it even more simply, the more people feel, the more people buy.
This is backed up by a lot of research, much of it by marketing scientists at the UK’s Institute of Practitioners In Advertising (IPA), who have discovered that an ad campaign’s chance of creating large business effects (like profit gain and share gain) is doubled in the long-term if it takes an emotional route creatively.
For brands looking to grow, emotionally resonant advertising is an excellent long-term investment. The quality of a brand’s creative can make a real difference to future share gain.
For brands looking to grow, emotionally resonant advertising is an excellent long-term investment.
It’s no surprise, for instance, that during the Lunar New Year festival, when consumers across Asia are being exposed to high numbers of marketing messages, that big brands take a highly emotional tone in their ads. In our survey of the 2019 New Year ads, Singapore’s Fraser & Neave was rated the most emotional offering by the consumers we surveyed. Their ad was unashamedly emotional, detailing the progress of a loving relationship across decades and touching on the notes of family and togetherness that are especially common during the holiday. It’s not the most original ad you’ve ever seen, but in our testing it scored a strong 4 out of 5-Stars.
Ad ratings and meta-learning about advertising
That Star Rating allows us to compare ads across different media, cultures and markets. At System1, we measure the quality of creative and model its impact with a method based in emotional response. Asking how people feel about an ad – using pictures of human faces as stimuli – is a fast, efficient and scalable way of measuring emotional reaction. So fast and efficient, in fact, that we’ve spent the last two years building one of the biggest databases of recent advertising in the world – over 30,000 US and UK TV ads from 2017 on, each one measured to predict long-term and short-term effectiveness.
This Ad Ratings database has let us make our own contributions to meta-learning about ad effectiveness. We’ve been able, for instance, to model entire categories against independent market share change data, which lets us how far creative quality is a leading indicator of share change.
The results vary by category. For a fast-moving category like breakfast cereals, mixing creative quality with media investment data is far more predictive of actual market share change in the subsequent period than using investment data alone. Creative quality acts as an amplifier for spend, meaning investments in high quality ads are repaid with brand growth.
But even in a far slower category like automotive, with far greater pressure at point of sale, creative quality explains more than twice as much growth as expenditure alone.
These category level models go beyond standard ROI, which focuses only on one ad. They take into account competitor activity – even a strong ad will underperform if it enters the market alongside even stronger work by rival brands.
The Ad Ratings database also lets us look at the effectiveness of ads by duration. So far, the sweet spot of emotional impact is around 30 seconds. That’s long enough to tell a story or crack a good joke – both ways to improve emotional response. But it’s not so long that the audience will start to lose track, get bored, or fail to identify the brand quickly.
Ultra-short ads: Can they build brands?
But in a changing world, is the 30 second brand-building ad a realistic target to aim at? Over the last few years we’ve seen increased interest among brands in ultra-short ads, between 5 and 10 seconds long. These are generally digital-first video ads which have some TV utility as well.
Most very short ads aren’t emotional winners. Even though micro-content creators have learned how to tell short, sharp stories on social media, those techniques haven’t transferred so well to advertising. Interestingly, though, when we look at our ad testing database it’s in Asia that we’ve seen the best examples of emotional ads under 10 seconds.
An ice cream ad from Japan, for Sunao, is typical of what works. Sunao means “honest” or “straightforward”, and with only a few seconds to use, this ad really does take a no-frills approach, pushing sensory pleasure with a shot of ice cream dripping from a spoon. It’s not sophisticated, but a 4-Star score suggests it’s effective.
That said, not every category is as sensuous as ice cream. But more prosaic consumer brands can work in ultra-short form too – a Korean ad for Minute-Maid also scored 4-Stars by showing a jolly celebrity punching a bottle of the drink, rapidly communicating excitement and fun.
These ads aren’t a radical break with past practice. They’re more like traditional advertising boiled down to its most basic elements. A brand, an image, and something – be it humour or sensory pleasure – to make you feel good. With only six seconds, editing is everything.
The power of fluent devices
What more could brands do to push on to 5 Star emotional impact with their micro ads?
One thing they could use more is Fluency – rapid recognition – and distinctive assets. If you only have six seconds – or less – to seduce your audience, then lead with assets they recognise and love. It’s here, for instance, that using a Fluent Device – a recurring character or slogan your audience enjoy – can really pay off.
Our work on Fluent Devices in advertising has shown them to provide a significant boost to campaign effectiveness – but at the same time they’re in decline in Western markets. So it’s to Asia we can look for examples of brands using Fluent Devices well.
In our Lunar New Year ad testing, for example, we tested a Coca-Cola ad, which was another in a series featuring their Chinese clay doll mascots, A Fu and A Jiao.
For the second year running, Coke’s New Year ad scored 4-Stars, but it’s in its multimedia strategy that the power of a Fluent Device becomes clear. The dolls were broadcast on digital billboards, and in a tie-in with Alibaba Coke let customers send one another a red packet containing gifts based on the characters. The power of a Fluent Device is that it becomes not just an instantly recognisable mnemonic for the brand, but a beloved carrier of emotional resonance in its own right.
That was definitely the case for Otou-San, the white dog – and gruff family patriarch – who became instantly familiar to Japanese consumers in the 00s and 10s as the face of telecoms giant Softbank. Otou-San’s short and surreal ads were regularly voted the most popular on Japanese TV, and the series kept finding new scenarios for its star, including sending him into space for a series of ads.
More impressive than the campaign’s longevity was Softbank’s performance, growing from an also-ran in the Japanese telecoms market to the number two spot. Not all this success was down to its advertising, but in a 2012 Japan Times interview, Softbank marketer Tatsuro Kurisaka, claimed the campaign paid back its costs between 20 and 30 times.
Emotional advertising for long-term branding
In a world where short-form content and short-termism is increasingly the norm, such long-running campaigns are encouraging. But Asian markets provide their share of great emotional long-form content too. Thai ads, in particular, are praised and closely studied around the world, for the remarkable balance they achieve in using negative emotions then turning them around to an amusing ending.
In our most recent FeelMore50 list of the world’s most emotional ads – released last year – a Thai ad scored a 5-Star score in just this way. The ad, for pharmaceutical brand Verena, also won a Cannes Gold Lion. It showed a bizarre roadside encounter between a patrol cop and two smugglers, before all concerned gradually realise that they’re in a diet pill ad. The commercial lingers on the confusion, fear and anger of the situation before using humour to resolve the ad brilliantly.
Verena’s ad wasn’t the top-scoring APAC commercial on the list, though. That honour went to Japanese group YKK, who are the world’s largest zipper manufacturer. Their charming 5-Star ad showed animals on a child’s patterned coat coming to life to try and undo her zipper and received outstanding emotional scores. “Zipper And Bears” isn’t just a great ad, it’s living proof that there’s no product too mundane to make and benefit from the power of great emotional advertising.
