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Innerscope's comprehensive biometric and eye tracking study found that television was the most effective medium at delivering high emotional and cognitive responses to advertising.
Why Did Television Outperform Other Media?
On a frontier that compares levels of cognitive and emotional response by platform - such as the one illustrated below - television outperformed the other platforms on both axes, effectively pushing the frontier to new levels.
The reason for the success of television in generating engagement has to do with another efficient frontier, as demonstrated by what Innerscope calls a brand immersion model (see diagram below).
This diagram places television back on the frontier arc. By contrast, however, the graphic shows a comparison of the methods of information processing, not their value. The y-axis tracks the level of immersion that a platform generates - how it draws the consumer into the world it presents. The x-axis tracks the flexibility of the platform - the range of experience that the platform enables the consumer to have.
From a neuroscience perspective, immersive platforms primarily utilize a "bottom-up" process that primarily uses the emotion or limbic centers of the brain and mirror neurons to provide an emotional connection on an unconscious level. Flexible platforms primarily utilize a "top-down" process that relies more on rational and cognitive centers (and emotion centers) involved in decision making.
On this frontier, television and online are in an equivalent (efficient) spot, but they create very different types of experiences. The brand immersion model states that there are two primary ways to engage with content:
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Highly immersive content triggers "bottom-up" processing and substitutes the viewers" emotional state with the emotional lives of the onscreen characters. If those characters need a product, the viewer feels that same need. Examples include television, movies, IMAX, dramas, and events such as the Olympics. Immersive content enables advertisers to create new need states.
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Highly flexible content triggers "topdown" processing and requires the need to already be established. The content (or advertising) then supports this need. Examples include the Internet, smart phones, headline news, and Amazon.com. Highly flexible content allows consumers to explore the full depth of their existing needs.
Television is highly effective at advertising because it is the primary medium that can use the power of emotional response to create a need state, either through experiencing the needs of the onscreen characters unconsciously during the primary content (results confirmed through the research team's experience with multiple immersive content producers including NBC, Warner Bros., Fox Broadcasting, and the National Geographic Channel) or through the high emotional involvement with these onscreen characters during the advertising itself.
As a person watches television content, he or she becomes immersed in the lives of the characters onscreen, mirror neurons fire, and he or she begins to feel what the onscreen characters feel. There are three routes this effect can take:
1) In the ideal advertising situation, when the characters have a product need that is natural to the story, the audience feels that need as well, and new brand connections are formed. For example, a recent study conducted for Warner Bros. examined Walgreens brand integrations into both "The Bonnie Hunt Show" and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." High levels of engagement occurred when the content:
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roused curiosity;
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focused on customer benefits over descriptions of features or product attributes;
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communicated brand messages through natural sounding conversations, stories, and jokes that entertained and flowed with the program rather than disrupted;
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discussed positive values related to the brand.
2) When celebrities and situations featured during the current program are used as spokespeople and primes for products advertised during that program's commercial breaks, the need state can be activated. Examples include Hayden Panettiere appearing in a Neutrogena commercial during an episode of "Heroes" and advertising a new car after the nameplate vehicle appeared in a car chase.
As part of its ongoing TVinContext work, Turner Broadcasting compared engagement with advertising aired after relevant scenes versus the same ads in a less-related context. In one example, an advertisement for OnStar featuring an unknown actor in a car accident followed a car chase scene in the movie "The Bourne Supremacy" starring Matt Damon (Universal Pictures, 2002). The primed ad (plus the seven other comparably tested examples) garnered significantly more emotional engagement than the exact same ad aired without any level of context priming.
3) Finally, as people become immersed in content, there is emotional spillover into the ad pods. Although it is not as strong as natural integrations, this emotional carry-through is real and creates stronger emotional connections than in other mediums. This essential structure of television is a pattern consistently seen in other studies of program content and ad pods.
All Television All the Time?
The efficient frontier of the brand immersion model means that all media-platforms along the frontier have the same capacity to create engagement; they just have different tradeoffs.
With flexible experiences, individuals may seek out experience more customized to their interests. For the most successful executions, this can result in higher engagement with content than on television (i.e., Facebook has more users than the populations of many countries).
The reason for this heightened engagement is that more and more content is user-generated. Online platforms allow people to broaden their conversations with one another instead of engaging with the stories of other people. Though this usage generates high engagement for the content, advertising often does not keep pace, and other platforms offer an opportunity to complement the television experience.
Newspaper, radio, and online platforms can leverage the emotional connections and need states generated by "bottom-up" processing in a launch in an immersive environment such as television. By building emotional connections and relevance to the brand in engaging television programming, elements from the campaign can be leveraged in other platforms. Once that relevance has been established, the advertisements on other platforms will generate more attention, memory, and emotional appeal.
The pairing of the movie "Iron Man 2" and Audi demonstrates the potential of such synergy. They appear together not only in the movie but in television spots for the car and commercials for the movie. Each is featured on the other's Web sites and in online banners on other relevant Web sites.
By building a connection to the car in an immersive environment, Audi hoped to leverage this new connection across the content landscape to build brand appeal. Companies that leverage both the emotion generated in immersive environments and the choice offered by flexible environments have the best opportunity to succeed in an evolving media landscape.
Conclusion
The present study suggests that other platforms are not as effective at building engagement with the products and services offered in television advertising of national brands.
Why does this medium matter so much? Though other platforms may target niche audiences very well with content that is already relevant to them, television content does not necessarily need preexisting relevance because it creates relevance.
The key finding in this study showed that, for a general audience, television commercials deliver the greatest advertising impact as measured by unconscious attention and emotional response compared with other channels of communication. Television is an emotionally immersive platform that can create need states.
Source: Journal of Advertising Research, 09/2010
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