Why advertising is emotionally stunted and how to fix it /

Image created using Midjourney

Every year, Cannes Lions winners spark conversation about how they made us feel. Emotions are talked about all the time in advertising, but do we know what we’re talking about?

There is a disconnect at the heart of great ad creative, and it’s our poor understanding of emotions. Successful creatives have always understood that the secret to great advertising is — as Dan Wieden once said — ‘just move me, dude’. 

Likewise, from an academic standpoint, advertising studies clearly link emotional response to effectiveness. Yet in the creative engine of the best shops in the world, we’re working with little to no colour as to what an ‘emotional’ ad is.

Here at Daivid, we’re long-time practitioners of ad effectiveness and, especially, emotions in advertising, and we think this disconnect is hurting the industry.

We’re under the eye of Sauron as budgets get spread across channels and those generative AI hordes mass at the gates. Frankly, if there is a lever that we can pull to drive repeatable success then we should do it now. And the biggest lever is fixing the loose language and subjectivity that swirls around emotional advertising — that the one ring that rules them all and binds all these threads together.

So, now we have a clumsy Lord of the Rings analogy, let’s look at the problems that causes. Firstly, we’re all a bit crap at defining emotions and to a degree; that’s not our fault. We lack a common lexicon for our complex emotions, and that breeds homogeneity.

Think about at last year’s (UK) Christmas ads. All a bit samey, right? That’s because the language in the campaign briefs will have been very woolly. ‘Make it emotional’, they would have said, leaving the interpretation of what that means exactly to the agency. And our Daivid Christmas ad study proved that homogeneity, by finding that 96% of spots we measured evoked warmth and 72% of them elicited amusement.

Super Bowl ads are similar. While the default UK Christmas ad is a tear jerker, the archetypal Super Bowl brief this year was obviously to ‘make ‘em laugh’ — and it was carried out with varying degrees of success. Our Super Bowl report showed that two thirds of the Big Game ads had amusement as their lead emotion, but only seven ads made more than a quarter of their audience laugh out loud. That’s 10% of the 70 that ran. Our heartwarming winner was NFL’s, ‘Born To Play’. And guess what? It felt different to everything else with outstanding scores for ‘inspiration’, ‘admiration’ and ‘warmth’.

With an emotional lexicon that is limited to ‘make it funny’ or ‘make it a tear-jerker’, creatives are leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. There are 39 emotions in the Daivid classification. Entrancement, Craving, Empathetic Pride, Trust and many more can be catalysts for emotive and effective campaigns that look and feel different to competitors. And the Von Restorff effect dictates that if something looks and feels different, it will be remembered. Memory is the key driver of people actually going on to do something positive for the brand. Alternating between the same few emotions is like playing cards without the full deck.

We all know that people in the US have different emotional responses to people in France or Japan, but still, the global/local challenge persists. 

Our emotions are rooted in culture, which has been covered in numerous books, not least by the brilliant Batja Mesquita in Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. Imagine then, a clearer understanding of the emotional make-up of your target countries. Or at the very least, how about a set of watchouts?

If there was a shared language around emotions, you could ensure your creative would resonate in the Shire as well as Gondor (hang in there, I promise this LotR analogy will come full circle).

There are also dangerous myths in advertising when it comes to emotions. 

‘Annoying ads do/don’t work’, ‘X is the best emotion for sector Y’ — we get told these ‘facts’ every week. There is SO much conjecture in ad opinion anyway, we don’t need more about how some commentators may THINK people feel. 

Coming back to data and classification may seem anathema to the creative process, but as a counterpoint, surely a shared language would round off some of those jagged edges? Firm up those briefs and provide clarity. We all know that assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. What if my (brand) version of emotional is different to yours (agency)?

People respond emotionally to every bit of stimuli they encounter. Contrary to what a lot of adland thinks, that means not just big TVCs but also basic, bottom-of-the-funnel ads.

We’ve written this article mostly to persuade the industry to adopt a wider emotional lexicon to help brief these big TV spots, but there is actually a bigger prize to be won here, and that is the application of a better understanding of emotions to ALL ads, from top to bottom. 

There is already too much stuff on too many channels and those generative AI orcs are about to overrun Helm’s Deep. With a better understanding of emotions we can make less of the stuff that is destined for digital landfill and more that will actually do the job it was intended to do. As Tom Roach said in The Wrong & The Short of It, it’s time to think of brand and performance together and that’s achieved through an understanding of the emotions you want to evoke with any of your ad creative.

You can imagine our surprise when we opened the IPA/Better Briefs doc of 2022 and found that only fleetingly on page 15 does it deal with how people feel. Don’t get us wrong. We love the IPA and the desire to brief better, but both as creatives and academics, we know emotions are underrepresented when you think about how much effect they have on brand outcomes. 

So, what’s the point? Well, we need to go on a journey. And together as creatives, data professionals and academics — dare I call it a fellowship? — we need to put the human in advertising before its presence is eroded even further. 

We face an uncertain future and in the face of increased creative automation it seems natural to us that the antidote is a better shared understanding of the very thing that makes us human — emotion. 

We all know the journey is what counts and our first steps out of the Shire require teamwork and shared language. If we don’t get that right then we’re never going to be able to chuck that Ring into Mount Doom and rebalance the human and the machine in advertising.