Top Advertisements of 2018: Static ads analysis

Authored by Ranjan Kumar, Founder & CEO, Entropik Tech.

When it comes to static advertisement campaigns across the board, be it online or print media, getting high viewership, high recall, having people engage with them or share them on social media comes down to a few fundamentals. In this article, we try and bring these fundamentals to light and unravel the dynamics behind ads that have attained virality and popularity.

In 2018, India’s total expenditure in advertising grew by around 13% to Rs.69,347 crores and out of this, the share of print ads was worth Rs.18,437. Meanwhile, the total banner ad revenue generation in India was worth Rs.2968 crores in the same year and is expected to grow at a CAGR (2018-2022) of 15.4%, resulting in a market volume of $752 million by 2022.

With the enormous amounts of funding being poured into creating these ads, it is imperative for advertisers to have a foresight of their ad’s performance and be able to access metrics that predict the likelihood of its success and failure.

Emotion Analytics for Media Testing

Today’s emotion recognition technology offers a venue to solicit these inputs for advertisers by analyzing consumers’ emotions and breaking them down into various quantifiable metrics such as emotional impact, attention, engagement, retention, activation, enjoyment. Futuristic as it sounds; this technology is already being used by many brand giants including Disney, HUL & more to optimize their video content and ads (video & static)

In India Affect Lab is the only EmotionAI SAAS platform that provides online access to a full suite of emotion reading technologies including Brainwave Mapping, Facial Coding and Eye Tracking to measure consumer’s response to various creatives including ads(static & video), promos, trailers and even original video content (episodes/ movie)

Testing Static Ads for the year 2018

Using Affect Lab’s Facial Coding technology which reads viewers’ emotions via analyzing their micro and macro facial expressions, we tested around 100 ads made in 2018, to rank them and extract the emotion analytics data for each. Ads for brands Amul, Hyundai, ITC, TATA, Uber etc. were tested.

Here is a snapshot of how each ad ranked on Affect Lab emotion metrics.

For the purpose of this article, we focus on ranking ads based on 3 parameters: Emotional Impact, Attention, and Engagement.

Top 5 Highest Emotion Scoring Ads

Getting people to notice an ad depends on its Clutter Breaking Potential, however, getting them to talk about it or share it, comes down to how well they connected emotionally with it.

Here we measure and analyze the Emotional Impact which consists of people experiencing positive and negative emotional triggers. The top 5 ads that pack the emotional punch & tug at the heart strings of people the most are listed below

• Adopt An Endangered Animal. Save Its Life.
• Rin’s Ad Campaign Highlighting India’s Acute Water Scarcity Problem
• Who Says – Saree Can’t Be A Dress
• Amul’s Witty Caricature Of Rahul Gandhi Hugging Prime Minister Modi 
• Cricket For A Cause

P.S. Positive Emotions include feelings we experience when we are happy and surprised & Negative emotions are registered when we feel sad, angry and averse.

Ad creatives are designed to evoke strong emotional responses including both positive and negative. Out of these some are meant to make us laugh while others are intended to move us to tears and when these emotional triggers become consistent with the goal of creative, a successful campaign is born.

Top Attention Grabbing Ads:

Ads have their own way of communicating to the masses and are a powerful tool to sway public opinion, create awareness and even change the way the world perceive certain realities of life.

Our emotion analytics measure how intently ads enticed and mesmerized viewers’ attentions and pick those that manage to catch their undivided attention as given below.

1. Sea Pollution Marine Animals - Crocodile

2. Donate. Help. Save Kerala

3. India's Safest SUV

4. ‘Adopt An Endangered Animal’

5. Amul’s Caricature Ad

Most Engaging Advertisements:

It is now known that people are no longer interested in a lot of information about the products or brands in the advertisements, but they want ads to entertain and engage them.

Here the emotion analytics we generate measures and picks ads that viewers find highly engrossing or deeply engaging.

• Even Champions fear this hurdle, by Fevicol
• Adopt an endangered animal’ ad
• SCARE NO ONE. This Halloween Drive Safe With Chevrolet.
• Dominos – Midlife vs Midnight Crisis
• Uber No bargaining No Fuss
• Emotional Impact, Attention, and Engagement combined with other emotion metrics are crucial in helping old and aging brands reboot their consumer engagement, young brands find the right target group along with new consumers and successful brands maintain healthy and consistent consumer-centric dialogues.

Affect Lab’s media models can be easily incorporated into the process of creating & promoting ad campaigns. Emotion Analytics enable marketers to select the best among the many variants of each ad campaign, optimize their media plans, and choose the right creative for specific demographic.

What is evident from the 5000+ print and video ads that we have analyzed at Affect Lab is that emotion targeting is at the core of advertisement today and brands must ensure they add emotionality in their attempt to engage their consumers via ads, as that would enable them to rightfully leverage the huge budget they set aside to invest in creating these print ads.

Emotional advertising performs almost twice as effectively as purely rational ads. When measured in terms of campaign effectiveness, emotional ads scores 31% while rational ads scores 16% and an advertisement that combines both rationality and emotionality scores 26%.  Ads that have been analyzed and previewed using our emotion metrics have witnessed up to 4 times better conversions, achieving higher recall and better ROI.

Affect Lab offers a one month free trial for its media testing services, the same can be availed at www.affectlab.io

Ranjan Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Entropik Tech, a Bengaluru based EmotionAI startup that helps brands measure cognitive and emotional response of consumers towards content or product experiences with Emotion Recognition Tech & optimize these experiences to resonate emotionally with consumers.

At Entropik, he heads a team of researchers, data scientists, engineers and business professionals with strong academic backgrounds from prestigious institutes like IITs and Oxford. He has been instrumental in conceptualizing our patent-pending advanced emotion AI technology.