Study promises lasting effect through emotional messages

Advertising is particularly successful when it addresses consumers with easily digestible, emotional messages. However, the current study "Make a Lasting Impression" by the market research and consulting company Kantar Millward Brown shows that only one in seven advertising campaigns takes this recipe for success into account

The study is based on analyses of more than 160,000 tested advertising media in the Kantar Millward Brown database. The study pursues the goal of increasing the understanding of the success factors of advertising and enabling more efficient campaigns. Advertising with a strong creative impulse, triggered by the emotional involvement of the recipient, promises significant increases in the predicted short-term sales figures. Kantar Millward Brown also looked at post-campaign sales figures for 1700 advertising campaigns. The results clearly show that sales increase when the focus of the advertising is on emotional relevance and involving creation.

In a further step, Kantar Millward Brown used automated facial coding (a System 1 approach) to investigate the implicit reaction of consumers to more than 9000 campaigns of medium and large established brands. The result: the advertising media that elicited the strongest reactions were also the most successful in terms of increasing sales figures.

In parallel to this analysis, advertising media on TV, as pre-rolls, and in social media were examined for the study over a period of one week. Kantar Millward Brown came to the conclusion that only 15 percent of the advertising formats studied relied solely on an easily absorbed emotional message.

Daren Poole, Global Brand Director, Creative Development at Kantar Millward Brown, comments: "Advertisers should move away from just the message and towards the impression they want to convey of the ad and the brand as a whole. This includes creative ideation, storytelling, and emotional tone. Stop selling product features. Show, don't explain!"

The study defines Five key topics for the development of strong advertising media:

Make a Meaningful Impression: From decades of experience in brand tracking, Kantar Millward Brown has identified the drivers of successful advertising. They must be meaningful to the customer / consumer and different from other brands. Advertising must clearly highlight the brand's purpose, what it stands for, its values and views. Campaigns like Always's #likeagirl not only provide engaging content, but also leave impressions that will support the brand in the long run.

2. work with the brain, not against it: Advertising that creatively and emotionally engages consumers works better than advertising that delivers only one explicit message, because viewers tend to filter out those messages. It is important to limit the number of main messages to just one if possible. Analysis of more than 1,000 ads has shown that 30 percent of viewers remember the message when only one key message was used. In campaigns with three main messages, a maximum of 14 percent can remember the first message.

3. good storytelling leaves an impression: Storytelling is a key strategy to engage consumers. But it rarely succeeds in integrating brands. Kantar Millward Brown studied 14 markets and found that stories play an important role in Kenya, India and the U.S. in particular - more than 50 percent of ads included story elements. However, more than half of them also contained explicit product or service messages.

4. no brand means no impression: Even with emotionally involving advertising, it is crucial that the sender is clear. This is especially important with digital advertising, as click-away formats leave only a few seconds to make an impact. Kantar Millward Brown data from the last 25 years has shown that advertising with high branding has a strong effect on increasing sales - 68 percent of ads with strong branding deliver short-term sales growth, compared to only 53 percent for ads with weak branding.

Get the channel right: Choosing the right channel is not just about where consumers watch content. It's also about identifying which channel consumers are most receptive to advertising messages on and which formats consumers are most positive about. For example, the results of Kantar Millward Brown's AdReaction Gen X, Y and Z study show that while young consumers watch less TV, they are more receptive to TV advertising than to all digital formats.

The report on the study and further information can be found at Millwardbrown.com/impressions.