There’s simply too much clutter these days to neglect the quality of the creative. Viewers are bombarded with ads all day every day. Consider this: 15 minutes of every hour of paid television are allocated to ads. And assuming all ads are 30 seconds long, that translates to 150 ad exposures a day (30 ads per hour for an average of five hours) on TV alone. Add in online video ads, digital ads and all the other branded messages we’re exposed to in our daily lives, it’s easy to see how hard an ad has to work to truly connect with its audience.

That’s where emotions come into play. But while the industry has a long history of measurement solutions based on metrics like recall, recognition, intent and consideration, those solutions do not do a very good job of capturing whether an ad creates an emotional connection with the viewer.

With recent advances in copy testing and the development of innovative survey techniques to monitor in-market performance, we now have the tools to measure the emotional response to an ad both before and after a campaign launches.