How attention and emotion combine to drive effectiveness

Without attention, ads cannot have an emotional impact, and without emotion, marketers are unlikely to build brands for the long term, new research from the Ad Council Australia, Amplified Intelligence and System1 has found.

This analysis drew on a sample of 39 Australian Effie case studies, bolstered with campaign data from the Ad Council Australia.

It was presented at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity by Karen Nelson-Field, CEO of Amplified Intelligence, Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer at System1, and Rob Brittain, a marketing consultant who runs Robert Brittain Consulting.

The background

• Last year, Nelson-Field and Wood warned a Cannes Lions audience about the “triple jeopardy” of attention in a presentation with marketing effectiveness expert Peter Field.
• Dips in advertising effectiveness, they asserted, resulted from short-termism and the incorrect assumption of 100% attention being paid to every ad.
• Meanwhile, most ads were simply not reaching the threshold needed to commit an idea to a consumer’s memory.

Plan for attention

• At this year’s Cannes Lions, the findings from the Australian dataset reaffirmed that different formats and channels have extremely varied rates of active attention decay, said Nelson-Field.
• Fast-decay formats can begin with 61% active viewing before quickly dropping to 1%; slow-decay formats, by contrast, may burn less brightly, but have a greater opportunity to deliver the ad’s full payload.
• While media is the most important factor overall, creative can nudge attention seconds towards the upper boundary of each format’s average in terms of the seconds watched.

How attention and emotion interact

• For emotion-led ads to have the maximum impact, they need to be paired with media that effectively holds attention.
• A high-emotion ad will only garner 3% more attention seconds on low-attention media, but a high-emotion ad on a high-attention platform will draw 18% more viewing.
• “Emotional creative simply needs a better stage to be the star,” Nelson-Field argued in describing this insight.
• However, she added, even if that “nirvana” isn’t always possible, huge uplifts can be achieved just by pivoting from low-attention to high-attention environments.
• Simply by switching from low- to high-attention formats, low-emotion ads see an 81% uplift in viewing, while high-emotion ads see a 106% jump on this metric.

Creating for attention

• Orlando Wood, from System1, distinguished “broad-beam” attention, which is linked with the narrative- and feeling-seeking right brain, and “narrow-beam” attention, as connected with the short-term, goal-orientated left brain.
• This year’s research confirmed that “broad-beam” advertising outperforms its “narrow-beam” counterpart in terms of long-term business effects that grow brands.
• None of the narrow-beam campaigns in the sample achieved very large long-term share growth effects, versus 47% of broad-beam campaigns achieving very large effects.

Making budgets work harder

• Having an excess share of voice, where a brand’s share of communications in its category is greater than its market share, has previously been correlated with driving growth.
• Attention also matters here, the consultant Robert Brittain explained to the 2023 Cannes Lions assembly.
• Increasing spend on low-attention platforms, the study revealed, yielded an average 64% uptick in the typical number of very large business effects (from 1.1 to 1.8).
• Directing additional spend towards high-attention platforms generated a 135% spike in the average number of large business effects (from 1.1 up to 2.6).

WARC subscribers can look forward to a full treatment of the results in the coming weeks.

SPT