Why Zappi uses emojis in advertising research

Since their creation, emojis have helped people convey emotion more succinctly and easily than words. 

Think back to late-night texts, or the early days of logging into AOL and firing up AIM to chat with friends, where a simple 😭 could sum up your whole mood faster than a sentence ever could. 

Over time, those tiny icons evolved from playful shorthand into a kind of universal emotional language, cutting across age groups and cultures. 

Now, the same instinct that drives us to react with heart eyes (😍), a crying face (😢) or a laugh (😂) in everyday conversations is being harnessed in consumer research, where emojis offer a quick, intuitive way for people to express how an ad actually makes them feel — turning instinctive reactions into measurable data.

Today, Zappi uses emojis in advertising research as a core part of our holistic method for measuring creative effectiveness and understanding the why behind it. Through our Amplify Advertising System, we use emojis to capture both how an ad left people feeling and importantly to capture how people feel about an ad in real-time, allowing for second-by-second tracking of emotional highs and lows.

In this article, we’ll cover why Zappi chose to incorporate emojis into its consumer research platform, why it matters and what it helps uncover.

When creating the Zappi Amplify Advertising System, developed in partnership with major global brands, we set out to create a solution that enables you to research across the creative development process — allowing you to get insights early and often throughout and connect your learnings within one system. 

As part of this system, 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. 

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. 

We conducted robust side-by-side research to understand the similarity in measurement between emojis and facial coding. The results? Across 14 studies (with 800 respondents per study) there was high correlation between the second-by-second emoji exercise and facial coding.

These results made it clear that we could get similar emotional responses, but deliver these from a more representative sample (i.e. everyone, not those willing to turn on their camera and have their facial expressions recorded), globally and in a scalable way.

Now that we’ve covered how we got here, let’s take a look at how we’ve incorporated emojis into our platform. 

Zappi's Amplify Ad System predicts ad effectiveness in driving short and long term results by evaluating and optimizing the ad's ability to reach, resonate and create a desired response.

REACH: Does it cut through clutter, hold attention and link to the brand?

RESONANCE: How emotionally intense is the ad, what is the overall emotion it generates and what is the emotional journey through the ad?

RESPONSE: Does it trigger purchase or change the way someone feels about a brand?

The emojis are used specifically within the Resonance section of the framework to better understand how emotionally intense the ad is and the overall emotion it generates. 

Let’s take a closer look. 

Resonance 

In the Resonance section of our framework, there are three key areas where emojis are used to gather audience feedback: 

1. Overall Emotion 

2. Emotional Intensity

3. Moment-by-moment emotional response

Now let’s get into how it works.

When testing an ad with our methodology, respondents are asked to provide real-time reactions, clicking on as many emojis as they want while watching the ad to represent how the moments make them feel. This allows us to quantify two things: 

1. Identify the moments which are loved, amusing, confusing, disliked etc. to optimize the narrative. 

2. Identify the intensity of emotion by understanding how many emotions people feel during the ad.  

Finally, people are asked which emotion they felt most to identify how they are left feeling after watching the ad. Emotional journeys are great for engagement and going into memory but most ads want to leave you on a high so those positive feelings rub off on the brand.

This emotional response data is compared to norms and combined with other important metrics (such as brand recall) to understand whether an ad will drive short term sales and long term equity. And emotional peaks are identified to understand what's driving success or which areas need to improve.

How many and which emojis are used? 

We use a standardized set of eight different emojis in our research. 

In our research, we found that the average number of emojis selected decreased when consumers had more options to choose from; with more than 10 options causing respondents to become overwhelmed and find it more difficult to select an emotion. 

The larger sets included less intuitive emojis that made it harder to process quickly — like nuances and overlap between emotions such as Fear and Disgust for instance. In addition, using more than eight emojis proved to be sub-optimal for mobile screen experience — critical for ensuring the survey can be taken across devices.

The final set of eight were inspired by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and include: Love, Like, Laughter, Surprise, Confusion, Sad, Dislike, Anger. Respondents also have the option to choose ‘none of the above’.

The importance of emotional impact has been well-recognized within the advertising industry, with pre-testing developed to measure the impact. However, many of these tools previously failed to measure emotion across all respondents and were unable to unlock the true prediction capability of emotion.

With our second-by-second emotional reactions through emojis, Zappi allows brands to get that predictive read on how multiple elements of their ad concepts make their viewers feel — and ultimately, what’s resonating (or not).  

This gives brands the opportunity to optimize their ads down to the second, to help ensure they are eliciting the intended response and delivering an ad that truly connects with their consumer.  

To learn more about our Amplify Advertising System, reach out to us.