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Neuroscience
Affects around us create certain neurological responses that influence decision-making. We are able to measure multiple brain activities that are connected to human feelings. Advertisers can currently access this data using an FMRI test.
Media Studies
Media industries have changed advertising strategy vastly. From print to broadcast, then broadcast to digital, we now have access to determine exactly what the audience wants to see. The new name of the game: ALGORITHMS. Advertisers can tailor affective strategies to users who will be most responsive. This allows for more efficient marketing, getting higher returns from running more effective ads.
Psychology
One important psychological consideration for advertisers is connecting positive emotions with their brand. “Socially responsible marketing” is hugely important as a strategy for differentiating a brand from its competitors; people always want to root for the good guys. Connecting a company or product to charities or social causes is incredibly affective for people’s brand perception.
Story Telling
Affective studies have proven the importance of storylines in connecting an audience to the content their watching. Advertisers should keep two storylines in their minds: the micro and the macro. Individual stories (the micro) rely on compelling characters, what the characters are doing, and the product being sold. The larger story (the macro) focuses on themes and messaging, tone and attitude, and the brand.
We’ve come a long way from guessing how people feel when they see an ad. Today, affective responses can be tracked with real science. The PANAS scale (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) helps researchers pin down exactly how people feel before and after viewing content, offering reliable self-reported data on emotional states (Watson et al., 1988). However, people may give flawed remarks when explaining how they truly feel about an ad. That's why we moved to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which dives even deeper, lighting up the brain to show which regions respond to emotional and branded stimuli, often before people are consciously aware of their preferences (Knutson et al., 2007). This gives a quick and easy answer for advertisers to see if their content is eliciting the proper neurological reaction. The problem with fMRI is that there is not much room for nuance, and it may not correlate with conscious emotions. So we developed one step further: Facial recognition tech. This picks up on micro-expressions to predict emotional responses in real time (Kulke et al., 2020). Even heart rate and skin conductance are being measured as part of psychophysiological tracking, showing arousal levels when viewers watch emotionally charged ads. Whether it’s a dopamine surge or a subtle smile, we’ve got the tools to measure it.
However, these tactics are grossly underutilized in the advertising world. The most common test done before spending millions and millions on an advertising campaign is focus groups, which sometimes give phony results as participants may be overoptimistic or unrepresentative of the population. Receiving non-biased, quantitative, scientific data can provide insights that can change campaigns from a bust to a boom.
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