Unruly launches Pulse to measure emotional engagement in videos

News Corp-owned ad tech company, Unruly, is launching an emotional video tracker into the Australian market, claiming to give brands and advertisers tools to tailor work for greater shareability.

The company has been operating since 2006, building a database of reaction to brand advertising which is now being used to support the Unruly Pulse dashboard the company believes will change the way that agencies and brands create video.

Pulse was launched eight months ago and is building a global and local database of consumer sentiments around video ads that can measure how they react across different demographics, industry sectors, cultural events and times of year.

Lance Traore, Unruly’s Australia and New Zealand managing director, said the data allowed advertisers to research the emotional triggers that had helped drive the most shared ads and find areas that most resonated with target audiences or find gaps that might represent opportunities.

“Pulse is an aggregation of all the videos we are testing,” Traore said.

“By being able to identify and quantify the key drivers of consumer engagement, marketers will have a better understanding of what works for their audience and why.”

Traore said that tapping into emotions was increasingly a key to successful campaigns, particularly where people were engaged enough to want to share the work.

He said understanding the triggers for those emotions was a key that could be measured in analysing ads as they were created.

Traore said that the tool was being used by brands to see if global content could be repurposed for local markets, he cited Unilever as a company that could be benchmarking ads in 12 regions to assess if Pulse would work or if locally-produced content would be more effective.

“With Unilever, it often tests with the share ad tool the same video in seven markets to drill down to see is there is a common denominator that seems to be working across all markets that it can build on for the next piece.”

An example of how ads could be measured to see how they performed with audiences is iPhone’s 6s ads featuring the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street which has achieved 12 million views on Youtube and been shared heavily on social networks.

Pulse analysis of the ad showed it outperformed benchmarks in all ads and technology ads on emotional measures including happiness, hilarity, warmth and nostalgia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCbWyYr82BM

Emily Yri, events and marketing manager for Unruly in APAC, said the company hoped it would be used by brands to see who had managed create emotional engagement with viewers.

One of the early findings by Unruly has been the similarity in triggers between Australia and the UK and the gaps compared with the US.

Yri said the tool suggested that brands wanting to bring in repurposed content from overseas should look to the UK rather than the US where the audiences had much more in common in terms of the emotions that connected them with video content.