Our solution

InSites Consulting set up an online consumer community or Square and invited 64 Dutch consumers that usually watch online videos on a weekly basis. By sharing their arguments and discussing their online ad experiences, they helped Ster evaluate the impact of online videos.

Emotions were of particular interest. Therefore, we used ‘facial coding’ – a technique which analyzes people’s facial expressions while they are watching a video – to uncover to what extent negative emotions surface when watching short-form videos. This results in a ‘timeline of emotions’, establishing the most emotional vs least emotional moments in a video, and the impact on the ad.

Main learning: no negative emotions were shown, not even during the ad! Yet, when consumers are ‘disrupted by the ad’, it takes them time to build emotions when a new ‘story’ starts. Remarkable is that the quality of the content that is watched before or after an ad also has a clear influence on the advertising impact.

The impact

In the end, we identified six factors which influence how people are dealing with ads; these formed a ‘checklist’ for STER’s clients whenever testing their online advertising impact:

• Content: likeability of the content links directly to more conversion
• Situation: high-attention vs low-attention context leads to different advertising approaches
• Relevance: targeting the right way leads to more attention and less frustration
• Position: ads need to be embedded in natural breaks, e.g., before or after a program
• Device: snackable content and ads are more optimal for smaller devices
• Creation: ad visuals and positioning need to follow the logical reading flow