The “forgotten” metric: How emotion analytics predicts ad performance

Think of the commercials that stayed with you. 

You’ll probably remember the ads that made you laugh, that made you feel nostalgic for something or that drew you in with unexpectedly surprising concepts and characters.  

Creative success goes beyond just attention and recall. It also lies in emotion. 

A strong emotional response is one of the strongest predictors of in-market effectiveness. As Kelsey and I noted in our past post on emotions in advertising, 31% of effective ad campaigns have an emotional component, compared to 16% of ads with only a rational component. 

“Psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists often argue that we’re prisoners of the emotions, that we’re fundamentally and profoundly irrational, and that reason plays very little role in our everyday lives.” - Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto

With new developments in emotion analytics, you can accurately measure and analyze consumers’ emotional responses to your ads, using emotional signals as a guide to help effectively shape your creative from the earliest stages of the development cycle. 

In this post, I will take a look at emotion analytics in more detail and show you how to incorporate them into your advertising strategy to improve creative effectiveness. 

Emotion analytics refers to the practice of using technology to monitor and analyze consumers’ emotional responses to creative. 

Surface-level metrics like shares, likes, clicks and views can only give you shallow insights into the way consumers feel about your ads. 

While emotion analytics allow you to track and measure specific emotional states, helping you understand the deeper emotional impact of your creative. Emotion analytics can help you uncover and shape the overarching emotional tone of your ad. You can also use them to track moment-by-moment emotional reactions to different scenes, shifting music, taglines, claims and characters.

"Our ‘emotional brain’ plays a big role in our decision-making. Decisions are very much informed by our emotional state since this is what emotions are designed to do. Emotions quickly condense an experience, and evaluate it to inform our decision." - Kate Donoghue, Temple University

Emotion analytics chart the emotional arc of your consumer as they watch your ad. Which scene made them laugh? Which characters did they love or hate? Did they feel more intrigued when the music shifted? Did they feel confused when they heard your product claims?

In essence, emotion analytics help you understand the deeper influence your ads have on consumers’ emotional states — arguably the most powerful drivers of decision making.

Explicit vs implicit emotional signals

When it comes to emotional signals, there are two core categories: explicit and implicit. 

Explicit emotional signals refer to self-reported feelings. These are typically collected through surveys, focus groups or interviews. While implicit signals refer to biometric or behavioral indicators that help researchers uncover deeper emotional states. 

"Positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence people’s preference, judgments and even the amount of beverage they consume. 

This evidence is consistent with evolutionary considerations suggesting that systems underlying basic affective reactions originated prior to systems for conscious awareness. The idea of unconscious emotion is also supported by evidence from affective neuroscience indicating that subcortical brain systems underlie basic ‘‘liking’’ reactions." - Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge, University of California, San Diego and University of Michigan

Implicit signals are makers of deeper unconscious emotions. A flicker of anxiety, the smile that barely registers to someone as they watch, the hairs that stand up on the arm as the music shifts or a curious eyebrow raise. How can consumers reliably report on emotions they’re not even aware of? Many of these emotions barely register in the conscious, aware mind — processing with rapid-fire speed in the deeper emotional layers of the unconscious. 

Implicit signals are often measured through biometric measures or tools that track behavior indicators. These include: 

1. Facial coding: Tools that track the millisecond micro-expressions that flash across people’s faces and are often imperceptible consciously to the consumer and the researcher. 

2. Galvanic Skin Response: GSR measures changes in the electrical conductance of consumer’s skin, which suggest greater sweat gland activity. Sweat correlates with high arousal emotional states, from joy to anger and attraction. 

3. Heart Rate Variability: HRV is a measure of the variation in milliseconds between consecutive heartbeats — accounting for how stressed or relaxed someone is.

4. Modern behavior measurement tools: Modern behavior-tracking tools allow brands to track moment-by-moment instinctive emotional reactions, often without the expense of biometric approaches (while still keeping their accuracy). 

Self-reports on emotions are subject to biases like cognitive bias and social desirability bias that can undermine the validity and reliability of their reports. In the case of social desirability bias, consumers can tell researchers what they think they want to hear. While cognitive bias highlights the limitations of perception and language: how accurately do people track and understand their own emotions and how easy is it for them to explain subtle (often unconscious) emotional pulls they feel towards a piece of creative?

Four separate graphs show that emoji measures are typically just as accurate as facial coding. 

While self-reported emotional states are subject to biases and the vulnerabilities of memory and personal interpretation, self-reports can both validate and provide additional context to the implicit signals you can track using biometric measurements and behavioral indicators.

Emotional intensity and direction

To understand the emotional impact of an ad, you need to understand two things: emotional intensity and emotional direction.

To effectively categorize emotions, researchers use the Circumplex Model of Affect. This model helps you answer the following questions: 

• “Are consumers’ emotional reactions positive or negative?” 

• “Do these emotions correlate with low or high arousal states?” (e.g. are they intense or subtle?)

The Circumplex Model of Affect separates emotional states into two neurophysiological systems: 

• Valence: This covers the pleasure (think: joy, love and hope) to displeasure spectrum (sadness, anger and disappointment). 

• Arousal: This tracks low-to-high level of activation (or alertness-boredoom). 

Emotions are then arranged in a circle, allowing for the classification of moods and emotions at different levels of intensity. Here’s how these categories may track with different ads: 

High arousal and pleasant: Excited or happy 

High arousal and unpleasant: Anxious or stressed

Low arousal and unpleasant: Sad or exhausted

Low arousal and pleasant: Content or calm

Heartbreaks, graduations, weddings. 

Events tied to strong emotion often stay with us longer than other experiences. 

What’s the neuroscience behind this? 

According to neuroscientists, multiple neurons must fire in synchrony to create strong emotional memories in the brain. Powerful emotional engagement enhances memory encoding by activating the amygdala, the threat-detector in the brain, which processes threat, anxiety and aggression. The amygdala "tags" memories tied to heightened emotion in the hippocampus.

"Most people can remember where they were on 9/11, or what the weather was like on the day their first child was born. Memories about world events on Sept, 10, or lunch last Tuesday, have long been erased."

- Columbia University Irving Medical Center

This process deeply embeds the "key moments" of the memory in our brains. This is even more true for negative or high-arousal experiences, which are connected to a cascade of hormones, noradrenaline and glucocorticoids, that strengthen memory recall. 

If emotional memories are more deeply encoded in the brain then it naturally tracks that emotionally-evocative ads will be more engaging and more memorable to consumers. 

Here’s what the research tells us. 

Emotion and brand recall

Ads that spark strong emotion stay with consumers for longer, improving brand recall. According to researchers, 81% of people remembered the brand shown in emotional ads — compared to just 69% that remembered brands shown in rational ads.

"Examples of ambivalent states include sentiments such as bittersweetness and longing (also referred to by the German term Sehnsucht) and nostalgia. The feel-ing that occurs during cue-induced craving in addiction has also been viewed by some as a mixed positive and negative state (Cartwright & Stritzke, 2008; Veilleux, Conrad, & Kassel, 2013). Such feelings may be described and experienced somewhat differently across individuals, cultures, and contexts, but the fundamental condition of feeling simultaneously positive and negative appears to be universal." - Anthony G. Vaccaro (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Jonas T. Kaplan (University of Southern California), and Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California)

In particular, commercials that trigger ambivalent, bittersweet (such as nostalgia) or purely enjoyable emotions (like joy or amusement) improve brand recall by triggering the pleasure circuits in the brain. 

The creative equivalent of a stack of chocolate, commercials that create pleasurable emotions in the viewer trigger a neurochemical cascade of feel-good hormones like dopamine (excitement), serotonin (joy and wellbeing) and oxytocin (affection and warmth) — encoding the the memory and brand association more deeply into the brain.  

Find out how nostalgia in Google’s Loretta helped make the ad one of the top-performing Super Bowl ads of all time in my post on the factors that drive ROI for Super Bowl ads. 

Emotion and persuasion

The brain processes emotion-based information faster than rational information. Gut feelings are often emotion based — connected to super-fast unconscious emotional processing. These instinctual pangs give a good or bad sense of a place, person or decision before the rational mind can catch up and attribute a “why”. 

Unconscious emotions also give us “gut” feelings about brands or products. 

The subconscious mind processes information at a much faster rate than the conscious mind. While conscious thought is limited by attentional capacity, the subconscious is constantly analyzing patterns, storing data, and identifying anomalies. This reservoir of information serves as the foundation for intuitive insights."  - Neuroba

Think about your favorite brands. Notice what happens next internally. You likely pick up on an immediate, visceral emotional response — rooted somewhere in your body. 

You probably don’t immediately think of brand heritage, product quality or celebrity endorsements — you feel first. And think second.

Ad concepts that surprise us, taglines that make us laugh and story arcs that make us feel warm and nostalgic. Emotional connection draws consumers towards particular brands and products — instinct and emotion persuade, “data” helps justify these emotional decisions right before or after a purchase. 

Emotion and sales lift

Emotion-based ads don’t just persuade and influence in theory — they make a measurable difference to sales. Ads in the top quartile for emotional connection see nearly double the sales impact (78th percentile versus 41st). 

"When companies connect with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Consider these examples: After a major bank introduced a credit card for Millennials that was designed to inspire emotional connection, use among the segment increased by 70% and new account growth rose by 40%. Within a year of launching products and messaging to maximize emotional connection, a leading household cleaner turned market share losses into double-digit growth. And when a nationwide apparel retailer reoriented its merchandising and customer experience to its most emotionally connected customer segments, same-store sales growth accelerated more than threefold." - Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas and Daniel Leemon

In my past post on how psychology impacts buying behavior, I explored how the majority of consumers' decision making is driven by emotion-fueled instinct and heuristics — the deeper unconscious emotions, memories and imprints that sit outside of conscious awareness. It’s not easy-to-rationalize benefits that influence consumer behavior and create sales — it’s emotion. 

Emotions are powerful shapers and drivers of memory, decision making and brand loyalty. But they’re only useful in improving creative effectiveness if you can effectively track, categorize and understand them. Here’s how. 

Identifying friction moments

Identifying key moments of friction early in your ad development cycles is important for understanding exactly which moments either support or get in the way of engagement, conversions, brand linkage and memorability.  

You can use emotion analytics to track both meaningful and meaningless friction. 

Meaningful friction is moments of friction engineered to get the viewer to pause, reflect and challenge their perceptions or engage more fully in the material. Meaningless friction refers to any moments that create emotional stumbling blocks: like frustration, irritation or boredom. 

Pinpointing moments of meaningless friction can help you find “sticking points” in your creative. Meaningless friction can show you where your copy is unclear, a character is irritating or a scene is too long, chaotic or confusing. 

In the case of tracking meaningful friction, you can uncover emotionally-weighted moments of pause: signifying reflection, emotional resonance and deeper engagement. You can also track meaningful friction to understand if purposefully-architected moments of pause are registering emotionally with your audience. 

Think of how the creative team may have measured meaningful emotional friction with Burger King’s Moldy Whopper ad: 

Optimizing storytelling arcs

Stories are drivers of emotion: emotional narratives and endearing characters create oxytocin (the bonding hormone). High-stakes, high-tension arcs trigger cortisol — helping audiences anticipate resolution. 

Take this ad targeting Alzheimer's.

When you’re looking to create compelling ads, you need to be able to track and interpret how effective your storylines are at creating emotion in the viewer. You also need to understand how well the emotional arcs you’re creating align with and support your brand and product messaging. 

"Narratives that cause us to pay attention and also involve us emotionally are the stories that move us to action. Compelling narratives cause oxytocin release and have the power to affect our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors."

- Paul J Zak

To make sure viewers link your brand to your creative’s most memorable emotional moments, you need to synchronize brand or product mentions with high-level emotional moments in your ad (and make sure that it makes sense for your brand to begin with). 

With emotional analytics, you can also make sure that your brand isn’t associated with lasting negative emotional moments in your ad, ensuring they are the hero of the story. In the case of ads that rank high on displeasure and arousal, it can be more effective to mention your brand and product the moment after your viewer finds emotional resolution and equilibrium.

Comparing creative alternatives

You can also use emotion analytics to help you compare the emotional impact of different creative variations, allowing you to choose the variations with the strongest emotional impact on your audience before you launch. 

Use Zappi to compare multiple assets with real audiences at once. Zappi’s Amplify Ad System allows you to compare and analyze the emotional resonance of up to five different variations, using second-by-second emoji reactions to gauge consumer response. You can also test the creative across channels and in various stages of development — whether it’s an early-stage storyboard or close-to-launch ads for TV and social media. 

Traditional ad measurement is reactive, only delivering insights into creative performance after you launch. 

Campaigns that fail to emotionally resonate with consumers can be expensive, time-consuming missteps for brands. Emotion analytics help you to shift your approach to proactive measurement — allowing you to understand and predict consumer sentiment and shape your creative early. 

Pre-testing for ROI confidence

Pre-testing is de-risking. By assessing and measuring the emotional effectiveness of your creative, you can help make sure it delivers the optimal ROI and avoid wasting money on misguided production. 

Zappi can help show you which creative decisions will make the most emotional impact on consumers — helping you directly chart their potential persuasiveness and impact on recall, memorability and buying behaviors. Pre-testing using emotion analytics delivers creative confidence, reducing risk before you commit your full media budget. 

Forecasting brand lift

Emotional signals act as leading indicators, helping you effectively predict how your ads will impact sales, market share and brand equity before you launch. 

As we’ve seen, high emotional responsiveness directly correlates with memorability, ad persuasiveness and consumers’ purchasing decisions — making it one of the best predictive metrics to use to understand the direct future impact of your creative. 

Improving cross-channel consistency

A campaign might hit right on TikTok, but leave consumers feeling bored when it’s broadcasted on radio. 

Emotion analytics allow you to understand how well your campaign resonates across channels, helping you emotionally fine-tune your creative for different formats — while making sure you retain the emotional footprint of the campaign on every channel. 

As Kelsey writes in her post on QSR advertising, “Too often, creative is developed for single channels and retrofitted for others, rather than designed for fluid cross-platform and connected storytelling.” With emotional analytics, you can make sure your creative emotionally resonates on each channel — helping to make sure you deliver consistency in emotional tone that works for each medium. 

Let’s take a look at how you can complement emotion analytics in your ad testing framework.

Integrating emotional metrics into creative briefs

The first step in bringing emotional analytics into your testing framework is setting clear emotional engagement metrics in your creative briefs. 

What role do you want emotions to play in your ad? Will it make consumers laugh? Will it build oxytocin? Will it hit a peak of emotional resolution, bringing a new understanding of your brand or product? 

Consider these questions: 

• What are the baseline emotions you want consumers to feel? 

• What emotional arc do you want your creative to take consumers on? 

• Which emotional states align best with your brand image, values and story? 

Once you have clarity on these questions, make sure your metrics are tied to a clear system of measurement. 

Kim Malcolm and Kelsey Sullivan share why Zappi's Amplify emotion analytics tool uses emojis for measuring emotion in advertising, "We wanted to create a simple way to measure respondents' emotional reaction to the ad they are viewing. And not just an overall reaction, but how they respond emotionally throughout the spot at each moment."

They explain: 

"In the past, emotional measurement was done through facial coding, which was difficult and expensive to collect. According to Yale University, emojis are well-established, non-verbal and the world’s fastest growing language; making them a great option to ensure that all respondents could participate in an emotional response question without the need to download an app or rationalize their response. 

Using emojis in place of facial coding would allow us to not only capture real-time reactions but also enable us to seamlessly include emotional measurement in every test for all respondents, regardless of language or geographic location." 

Embedding testing into campaign timelines

Bake creative performance testing into your production cycles early. You want to gather feedback on consumers’ emotional responses to your ads early in production, using these insights as your guide to developing the most creatively effective campaign you can before launch. 

Agile consumer insights platforms like Zappi, that deliver insights within hours, are ideal for making sure your campaigns are built on strategic decisions guided by real audience insights — without slowing down the predictive creative testing process. Brands that use Zappi early in their development process, before production, often achieve the greatest creative effectiveness.

“Since partnering with Zappi, our creative effectiveness has improved by 30% across all our advertising. This equates to PepsiCo gaining hundreds of millions in value!"

- Stephan Gans, SVP Chief Consumer Insights & Analytics Officer, PepsiCo

Validating with real audiences

Zappi’s Amplify Advertising System allows you to measure moment-by-moment emotional reactions, giving you the opportunity to chart the emotional ups and downs of your ads. 

 "Putting the consumer at the center isn't just a philosophy, it's how we build strategies that embed brands directly into culture. Content at scale, informed by real-time consumer feedback helps us create more opportunities for meaningful connections and significantly mitigates the risk of ineffective creative wasting valuable media dollars. Consumer learning and insights cannot be afterthoughts—they are integral to creating truly impactful and efficient campaigns." - Wanda Pogue, chief strategy officer at VaynerMedia

Amplify is up to 60% more predictive than other research approaches and allows you to immediately pinpoint the high and low points of your ad and predict audience resonance and brand lift before you launch. Using an easy-to-measure emoji-based system, Amplify tracks the emotional highs and lows of your creative in real time and breaks down consumers’ emotional responses into distinct categories. 

Emotional response is one of the strongest predictors of advertising effectiveness. 

Modern emotion analytics turns creative evaluation from subjective debate into measurable insight — tracking the emotional peaks and lows of your creative to find out how your ads emotionally influence and persuade your audience. Brands that measure emotion early can launch with greater confidence, knowing their creative resonates with consumers and can deliver measurable brand lift and stronger ROI.