MediaPost
Analytics leader Ace Metrix is introducing the Emotional Sentiment Index (ESI), a new metric for determining the level of emotional engagement that consumers have with ads.
The index does not judge an ad, but rather gives the advertiser an index score to understand how the ad engages with viewers on an emotional level — positive, negative or neutral — relative to every other ad in the database, other ads in the category and other ads from the brand.
The ads currently seated highest on the index today are from a Dawn campaign “Dawn Saves the Wildlife,” which depict ducks, penguins, and otters being rescued and cleaned by Dawn dish soap. This series of ads, originally airing back in April 2010, remains at the top of the index with emotional index scores of 96 and 100. The campaign engages the viewer on a purely positive emotional level, with each ad earning more than 300 voluntary verbal responses.
Likewise, an advertiser intending to evoke a negative emotional reaction finds success by ranking low on the emotional index. A Terminix ad “Tentacles Over Cupcakes” holds one of the lowest places on the index at 12. Featuring up-close animations of bugs and critters invading the home, the ad elicits 283 voluntary verbal responses laden with the terms “gross,” “disgusting,” and “bugs” — likely exactly the reaction the brand intended to get.
The metric is one more way that brands can measure their ad creative as it relates to specific objectives, said Peter Daboll, Ace Metrix CEO.
“For some campaigns the objective is rational — for others, emotional,” Daboll said. “Take Visa, for example, who publicized their intention of going ‘100% emotional’ in their Olympic sponsorship ads this year. Their Olympic ads earned the highest spots on the index among all of the 144 Olympic ads.”
One of the inherent benefits of the syndicated model is the ability to introduce a new metric and retroactively apply it to the contents of our database, he added.
“As such, advertisers not only have this new metric to assess the emotional impact of their latest ads, but the Emotional Sentiment scores are available for all of our 22,000+ ads dating back to 2009,” Daboll said.
Using natural language-processing algorithms, Ace Metrix calculates the positive and negative words used in the hundreds of voluntary verbal responses, or verbatims, collected from each ad through the Ace Metrix proprietary testing environment. The Emotional Sentiment Index is represented on a scale of 1 to 100. An ad’s Emotional Sentiment score indicates where the ad sits relative to every other ad in the database.
While the Ace Score provides advertisers with detailed measures of persuasion — desire, relevance, change, attention, information, likeability, and the ad’s watchability, the Emotional Sentiment Index provides advertisers with a measure of emotional engagement. In reviewing the data from more than 22,000 ads, Ace Metrix determined that the Ace Score and Emotional Sentiment are essentially independent, thus providing the advertiser with entirely different dimensions to assess the effectiveness of their creative.
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