Brands are waking up to the fact that establishing an emotional connection drives business results.  As we saw in our Q2 ads of the quarter, emotion was a key driver of Breakthrough. Emotion, whether positive or negative, is what makes ads memorable, and perhaps more importantly in our social media driven world, shareable.

With brands shifting toward higher quality creative that drives engagement through emotion, Ace Metrix has developed Emo Clouds to understand the intensity of emotional connection with ads.

Emo Clouds are a key piece of the puzzle for understanding how advertising creative works with viewers. Establishing an emotional connection is a trademark of award winning, and highly effective advertising. Using NLP algorithms and clustering, Ace Metrix is uniquely positioned to categorize particular words aligned with specific emotional responses. Because we do this for every ad, we have remarkable context on how the most emotive ads distance themselves from other ads in the pack.

Emo clouds provide a visual representation of emotive words correlated with specific emotions. Our initial set of lenses Heart, Hook, Humor, Hate, Great and Yummy, reflect the types of emotional reactions respondents have to video ads.

The word clouds use viewers own words to describe their emotions. Some brands, like Procter & Gamble, found success from the heartfelt sentiment their ads drive. Their ad “Thank you, Mom-Strong” continued their Olympic tradition of pulling on the heartstrings by showing inspiring athletes and the supportive Moms behind them.Other brands find success from their humorous qualities. Doritos Super Bowl creative has done a fantastic job over the years at generating laughs, from both the delighted chuckle to the guffaw. “Middle Seat” from 2015’s Super Bowl brought the “LOLs” for a lot of respondents while also managing to draw some “awws” from its cute baby factor.

Emo Clouds are also helpful in understanding the complicated reactions to a potentially controversial ad. Carl’s Jr. knew they were courting controversy with their 2015 Super Bowl spot “Au Naturel” which features a woman who appears to be naked walking through a farmer’s market. The spot manages to hit on several of our Emo Lenses with some people noting that the ad is sexist (Hate), others who love it (Great) and still others who mentioned the all-natural burger patty (Yummy).

When used in conjunction with our quantitative Component Scores, the Polarity score and Ad Personality, Emo Clouds become a key indicator of overall creative effectiveness.