Richard Huntington, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Saatchi & Saatchi, says that ‘emotion is the highest form of interaction’. Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, argues that emotion is a necessary driver of almost all our decisions.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that content and advertising that harness our emotions are much more effective than rational campaigns.
At Bridge Studio we have put the power of emotion at the heart of our planning process – ensuring we make campaigns for our clients that not only connect with valuable audiences, but also change how they feel about each brand. And then we deliver a return, every time.
We use data and insight tools, together with journalistic experience, to calculate the best possible Audience for our clients, the right Emotions to engage them, and apply the right Motivations to get them to do something as a result.
We call this the AEM process.
Audience
Reaching out to people has never been easier for brands. Whether it’s via advertising, social media, outdoor, on TV or online video, there are multiple routes to finding an audience for your product.
We take that a step further. We have harnessed traditional planning tools like TGI and Comscore, and added first party data from The Times and the Sun, and other proprietary tools such as Engagement Labs’ ‘Word of Mouth’ database, the AI-driven IBM Watson tools, and Storyful Social DNA, a tool that monitors emerging trends across the entire social web.
Collectively News UK reaches over 97% of the UK population on a vast array of devices, in print, on radio, and via video. We use our Audience tools to ensure we know not just how to reach them, but who they are, and what they want, and when they want it. It is the most comprehensive suite of data that means we can be much more efficient in our media planning – giving you confidence, and saving you money.
Emotion
We know emotional marketing is important. A 15 year study by INSEAD concluded that over a three-year period, emotional advertising is over twice as effective at generating a return on investment.
But how do you know which emotional ‘levers’ to pull? Working with Unruly, the video advertising distributor, we have real tangible data that can ensure we harness the right emotional approach with our content. Unruly Pulse is a proprietary data engine that uses AI-controlled facial recognition software that, over a 15-year period, has monitored over 850,000 video responses based on over 2 billion data points. This is backed up by a traditional survey to ensure we have a robust, quantifiable source of data to know which emotions best engage different demographics.
We know, for example, that 35-54 housewives with children value content that makes them feel warm, positive, and happy. 35-54 fathers, however, look for knowledge and humour from their content. This additional layer of insight and understanding helps us to shape our creative approach for clients.
– for the first time we can quantify emotional marketing with billions of data inputs that help us understand what emotions work best
Motivation
We have the right audience; we’ve engaged them through clever, emotional content. Now what? We know that any content – even beautiful, engaging, expensive creative – is wasted if it doesn’t lead to action. We pride ourselves on making brilliant stuff that works – and have therefore embedded a commitment to understanding the right motivations for our audiences in our planning process.
We use a combination of tools to understand patterns of consumer behaviour. For example, Unruly Pulse shows us the different social motivations for sharing content – it might be tribal (‘look at this content, that proves I like this football team’) or to seek opinions (‘what do you think of this film/boxset?’).
By understanding from the very beginning what triggers we need to pull to make our audiences become your customers, we can shape our content to be much more effective. And if you look at some of the results in our case studies on this site, the results can be spectacular.With our AEM process we are able to create content that really changes how the world sees your brands. For more information, please contact us about any of the below services:
Brand and campaign strategy – Media and account planning
Content creation – TV, video, audio (broadcast radio, podcasts), articles, essays, supplements, magazines, journals and reports
Design – Audio and video production, animation, branding and co-branding, photography, graphic design, production services
Social media management – Community building, relationship management, social content sharing