Harnessing the power of emotion: Next-level advertising with Wurl’s creative analysis

Understanding how your audience feels can really boost the impact of your ad campaigns. Emotion analysis involves organizing your ads around the specific feelings they aim to evoke and using that insight to guide your selection of where your ads should be shown. This smart approach helps guide your viewers on an emotional journey that grabs their attention and builds stronger connections with your brand. In this post, we’ll explore why understanding and applying these techniques is crucial and why every advertiser should be incorporating them into their strategy.

Why care about creative analysis?

Creating ads that resonate emotionally with the preceding or surrounding content can significantly enhance engagement. When an ad evokes feelings that line up with what the audience just saw, it blends in smoothly and keeps viewers interested. But if an ad feels out of place — like a cheerful ad after a sad scene — it can be jarring and make people stop watching or paying attention.

So, how do we figure out the best setting for our ads? This is where creative analysis steps in.

Creative analysis uses data and GenAI technology to carefully check if an ad’s emotions match the moment. This method helps us figure out which emotions any given creative taps into, and what will work best for the campaign. Creative analysis can give you a sneak peek into how well an ad’s message, style, and images sync up with what the audience is feeling and the content they’re watching.

Why is creative analysis a game-changer on streaming?

Creative analysis is particularly important for streaming TV because of the unique viewing environment, especially compared to mobile or web.

Deep emotional engagement

Ads on streaming TV are longer and you can’t skip them, which means they’re great for really drawing in viewers. Creative analysis helps in crafting narratives that are not just seen, but felt. This kind of deep emotional connection is vital for making your brand memorable and building lasting loyalty.

Strategic narrative development

The longer format of streaming ads also allows for more complex stories, both in terms of content and emotion. Creative analysis plays a key role in figuring out which types of stories best fit your brand and which will resonate with specific audiences. It also helps plan how to structure these stories to make the biggest emotional impact.

By smart programming or frequency caps on your ad, you can tell emotionally complex multi-part stories that really hit viewers in the feels.

Bridging the AI implementation gap

Even though AI has the potential to boost creative strategies, many marketers have yet to fully integrate it into their campaign strategies. This slow pace is actually giving an advantage to companies that are already using AI to get instant feedback and fine-tune their ads.

Businesses that incorporate creative analysis into their marketing are really leading the way in crafting compelling stories for streaming TV. This approach is not just cool—it’s effective, helping them achieve better results and stand out in the market.

Case study: PMG focuses on anticipation to drive hunger response for QSR customers

Let’s take a look at a real-world example of where creative analysis delivered better results for an ad campaign. In this case, PMG, the ad agency, faced a challenge with their Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) client, who was experiencing a downturn in sales due to economic pressures. They needed a way to cut through the noise and connect with viewers on a new level.

To tackle this, PMG turned to Wurl’s BrandDiscovery to strategically align their client’s ads with streaming TV content that sparked feelings of hunger and anticipation. By tapping into these emotions, the ads connected more deeply with viewers, directly addressing the cravings that drive fast-food consumption.

This clever placement of ads led viewers to take immediate action — visiting the restaurant.

The numbers tell the story: restaurant visits jumped by 40%, and sales soared by 48%. These fantastic results highlight just how powerful it can be to use specific emotions, like anticipation, to make ads more relevant and impactful.

Enhancing measurement of creative impact

One big hurdle in streaming TV advertising is figuring out exactly how well an ad is working. GenAI addresses this by giving advertisers advanced analytics tools that break down and examine the effectiveness of specific emotional elements in their ads. Using Wurl’s free analysis, they can get a breakdown of the emotions that are actually present in their ad rather than relying on guesswork.

Marketers can also do pre-campaign creative testing with companies like RealEyes or System1, which are paid systems.

Paired with performance attribution, these tools go beyond just basic audience engagement numbers. They provide detailed insights that show how various aspects of an ad impact viewers, giving advertisers a clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not — in the most relevant contexts.

Using emotions as a paintbrush

Over the centuries, advertising has developed its own distinct language — a rich mix of visuals, words, and sounds that, when combined just right, speak directly to people’s hearts.

This language is deeply rooted in emotional resonance, harnessing core messages that trigger quick and strong reactions from audiences. As we explore the deeper, subconscious rules of advertising, it’s evident that syncing these emotional triggers with a brand’s message isn’t just helpful — it’s crucial for crafting ads that truly make an impact.

The emotional blueprint of successful ads

After delving deep into lots of ads, our team at Wurl have noticed some clear trends that really drive how consumers react:

• Joy: Ads that spread happiness and invite viewers to enjoy what’s on offer can be really catchy and leave people feeling good. This has a positive halo effect on your entire brand perception.
• Trust: This is super important in areas like finance and insurance, where people really need to believe in the brand they’re choosing — because it affects their life in big ways.
• Anticipation: This is all about making people look forward to something, and it works like a charm in food and drink ads where the next tasty bite seems just a moment away.
• Surprise: Mixing surprise with joy can turn an ordinary ad into something extraordinary, making it stick in the viewer’s mind.

These emotions are not just standalone experiences but are often layered to amplify their impact. For example, the excitement and joy in sports apparel advertising when a famous player scores builds a positive association with the brand, or the blend of surprise and delight in travel ads that promise adventures beyond the everyday.

Here’s how you can tap into the subconscious language of advertising to enhance your ad creatives, with a simple guide to the emotional cues you might use:

• Joy: “We want you to enjoy our product.”
• Trust: “We want you to trust our product.”
• Anticipation: “We want you to desire our product.”
• Surprise: “We want you to be amazed by our product.”

Every ad typically includes a “wow factor” to grab attention, but the real key to making an ad memorable lies in its messaging. Often, messages that combine an element of positive surprise with joy are particularly effective. High-impact moments, like those in sports when a player makes a big play, naturally combine surprise and joy, creating memorable advertising experiences. Our internal studies confirm that these moments stick with viewers, making them powerful tools for ad recall.

Strategic emotional targeting

The real challenge — and opportunity — for marketers is not just to recognize these emotional triggers but to really get good at using them in smart, nuanced ways to make their messages stick. Here are a couple of strategies to try:

• Mapping emotions to brand identity: Just like brands pick a color scheme or a stone of voice, you can create a ‘brand palette of emotions.’ This helps in crafting ads that really click with your target audience and stay memorable. While the viewer might not always remember the content of any individual brand, over time they will always remember how you made them feel.
• Combining emotions for greater impact: Mixing different emotions in your ads can really boost their effectiveness. This approach works because it hits viewers on several emotional levels at once, making the ad’s story more engaging and lively. This strategy helps make the advertisement not just noticeable, but truly memorable.

Creating an emotional palette

When creating ads, carefully choose the emotions you want to stir in your audience, consider the ideal setting for your ad, and think about what actions these feelings might encourage:

• Anger: This strong emotion can drive people to act, especially in ads that aim to inspire change. It’s also great for ramping up intensity and motivating viewers to take immediate steps.
• Anticipation: Great for simulating the feeling of relief from hunger or boredom, anticipation is ideal for ads promoting new products, special events, or even food delivery services.
• Joy ‘Plus’: Mixing joy with other emotions, like anticipation, can really boost the ad’s appeal and keep viewers engaged. Think of joy as the salt in a dish — a flavor enhancer that makes everything else in the ad pop.

Wurl’s free creative analysis tool

Wurl’s creative analysis tool, powered by the same advanced GenAI technology used in BrandDiscovery, allows brands to submit their creative content for detailed analysis. The analysis uncovers nuanced insights into the ad’s emotions and offers some direction as to the context in which it will be most successful. Better yet, it is completely free as part of your BrandDiscovery campaign.

The process is simple: advertisers submit their ads, which are then analyzed using GenAI to assess emotional alignment and viewer engagement. This analysis provides critical feedback that can be used to pick targeting criteria, refine creatives, or simply learn more about what is working. Continued optimization based on the scores ensures that each element — from imagery to dialogue — harmonizes perfectly with the intended audience’s emotional state.

Knowing exactly what emotions are present in your ads enables precise ad placements that align with the emotional and thematic context of CTV content, maximizing engagement and impact.

Talk to someone from the Wurl team to get started.