Infusing Ads with Emotion: “The Thing You Don’t Want To Do Is Convey Neutrality”

The average person in Britain sees a lot of ads every single day. How many? Estimates range from a conservative 50 all the way to 400, including TV, billboards, and social media. The bigger question is how many of those ads actually make an impression?

We all instinctively know that the answer is ‘not that many’ and it’s no wonder, making an impression – even fleeting – is difficult. Vitaly Boitelet, chief product officer and co-founder of SmartAssets, knows this challenge well and wants advertisers to think about the key to making an impression: infusing ads with emotion. “The one thing you don’t want to do is convey neutrality," offers Vitaly. “Audiences are all fatigued and weary of ad exposure, and it's something we have to respect. Eliciting a strong emotion is definitely what advertisers should aim for because neutrality is just going to trigger sameness and get ignored by them.” 

Vitaly also notes that context is everything when it comes to ads and emotion. Sometimes, no emotion is the right play like in the case of financial service brands. Negative emotion can be useful too, when deployed correctly, according to Vitaly who points to the ‘Modly Whopper’ ad from a few years ago. In that ad, Burger King did something unprecedented for a food brand: willingly created an association between its food and rot, mould, and decay; in other words, disgusting emotions that most food brands are always, by default, steering away from.

It was a clever subversion of the typical food ad and an unsubtle yet effective dig at its closest burger-selling competitor. “I don't know if many people went to buy a burger after seeing that ad but we're still talking about it now, so it definitely created a memorable impact,” Vitaly says. What this proves is that eliciting negative emotion in viewers, when contextual, can translate to positive ones. "It's really about wielding emotion well, more than following a blueprint,” he adds.

Ad analysis and helping infuse ads with the right amount of emotion is what SmartAssets does. The AI-powered service works from a continuously updated dataset which extracts and understands what emotions are being triggered when an ad is served to audiences. It takes into account a lot of different elements to analyse how advertising nudges people into one specific direction versus the other. Using SmartAssets allows marketers to “see what was successful in the past.” The results are often straightforward, says Vitaly of the ads that prove most successful, but “there are always surprises too.” However, it’s not a static process that tells marketers to simply recreate what has worked before, with Vitaly cautioning that creative iteration is vital.

With SmartAssets, brands can focus on ensuring that “they're communicating the way that they want and it makes for better advertising because those ads will resonate more with audiences. In that way, we are fighting against this ad fatigue and the weariness that’s present because we can predict what content they’ll enjoy interacting with more.”

Cultural context is vital here too. “People react differently to different stimuli based on culture. We do find some commonalities, but there are also big differences where the human aspect goes into machine learning. It’s all part of how we built and trained the model, ensuring to account for those cultural nuances. It’s baked into the model so the insights produced are based on the audience, the platform, and the country specific to the brand and where it wants to show up,” Vitaly explains.

Thinking more about what audiences want to see and creating ads infused with emotion – never neutrality – is something Vitaly advises more marketers to do. He’s previously told LBB that “too much focus today is on serving content that meets the brand's standards and expectations, like brand guidelines or regulatory compliance. This often places audience expectations as a secondary concern.”

That’s a dangerous position to take when audiences and consumers have more choice than ever and will switch their attention, and their spend, to the brands that are engaging with their needs more directly. Vitaly doesn’t think the solution is complex or unobtainable: “With SmartAssets, we are proving that these two aspects are not irreconcilable, even for lower-funnel activity. By aligning brand objectives with consumer behaviour insights, we can create ads that are both compliant and engaging, enabling better results.”