COMMENTARY

Emotional Attachment To TV Commercials - Should We Care?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 11, 2022

Emotional attachment to TV commercials is something NBC wants to consider -- as well as its value for its marketers.

Now before you roll your eyes and take a big sarcastic breath, let’s dig deeper. This isn’t your father's fuzzy consideration of what value a TV advertising is worth. New science is behind it.

Let’s start with the general premise, concerning other TV content -- TV programming.

Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact for advertising and partnerships at NBCU, in a blog post, suggests that if TV networks continue to hone in on why certain shows emote specific “emotional” attention -- and get high viewership and engagement -- shouldn’t marketers also want the same thing for ad creative?

It kind of makes sense, especially in a streaming world where there can be limited ad availability. Thus, each piece of creative -- with hopefully less frequency as well -- becomes that much more important. At the same time, we know that TV sellers selling streaming ad inventory may want a higher price. (Oh well. You get what you pay for -- mostly).

Consumers would generally rather not want to see any advertising.

Cost is always an issue. Want to spend $15 or $16 a month for the likes of an HBO Max or Netflix, or -- on the other end of things -- $5 or so a month for a Apple TV+, Paramount+, and Peacock? That's the new TV battleground.

So what might then make it easier for consumers when it comes to those lower-priced considerations? Finding the best possible advertising content that goes along with the programming content, that's what.

But what about that "fuzziness" -- creative value attached to emotions for each consumer, and then attached to those TV commercials?

Well, that apparently was in the past. New measurement systems -- such as Dumbstruck -- can combine insights from psychology, cutting-edge facial coding and eye tracking AI, says Abcarian.

Other companies are doing similar work -- including System 1, Emoto.AI, Kantar’s Link Ad Test, and Dynata's Ameritest.

Abcarian says NBC is working on building a “scalable model for creative testing” that “evaluates the emotional resonance of creative.”

This is all to say that future “alternative” measurement systems -- which are all the rage -- should not just be concerning measuring or guaranteeing on a specific set plain-old, diverse pieces of audience data, such as marketers' pre-set business outcomes levels or matching first party data of NBCU viewers with that of first party data of marketers.

The bigger question starts not only figuring out what viewers liked -- whether they were entertained by a commercial -- but what specific emotions were revealed. Consider everything I'm guessing: Cry, laugh, mull, or melancholy gazing into space included.