最近的一个早晨，办公室里爆发了一场关于什么是伟大广告的即兴讨论。我们讨论了我们最近最喜欢的几个广告，可以想象，关于哪个是最好的建议范围很广。短形式和长形式。有趣和感伤。以产品为导向，以品牌为重点。理性和情感。虽然它们的长度和目标各不相同，但有一点是明确的：它们是 "必须观看 "的广告--不是节目间歇的填充物，而是我们想要谈论、分享和反复观看的伟大创意。
当我回顾尼尔森卡塔琳娜解决方案（NCS）和尼尔森的一个新的联合研究项目的结果时，我被提醒了伟大的创意的重要性。结果加强了一个古老的广告锯：创意为王创意是推动我们参与的东西，分享，谈论，辩论，记忆和购买。创意具有巨大的力量，不管它在什么地方、什么时候、以什么方式运行。1984年苹果公司介绍Macintosh电脑的广告至今仍是人们谈论最多的广告之一，而它只在国家电视台播放过一次。
该研究试图量化对广告效果有贡献的五个关键驱动因素的销售贡献：创意、覆盖面、目标、时效和背景。研究结果显示，这些驱动因素之间的相对平衡是如何随着时间的推移而变化的，以及它是如何在电视和数字渠道中发挥作用的。对我来说，最有趣的一点是，研究结果表明，创意质量对一个品牌在市场上的成功的贡献与所有其他因素的总和一样大。此外，研究发现，当创意强大时，它是市场成功的压倒性驱动力：传统电视广告高达80%，数字广告为89%。相反，当创意薄弱时，电视和数字广告的销售提升也很弱，其他媒体因素才是主要驱动力。
简而言之，伟大的创意仍然是任何广告活动成功的唯一最重要因素，包括传统电视和数字平台。新的工具和技术可以加强、扩大和更好地锁定目标范围，新的格式和目的地似乎每天都在出现，以帮助广告商找到他们的消费者。但在推动真正成功的广告活动方面，它们根本无法与伟大的创意所带来的力量相提并论。
This, of course, raises several questions: What is great creative? How do marketers know if their creative is “great?” And how do they achieve great success with it?
In the past, marketers have relied on qualitative and/or quantitative self-report copy testing to evaluate creative. Essentially, they made decisions based on biased consumer responses often aided by their professional eyes and instincts. Essentially, they went with what they thought would work. While this may have kept very poor advertising off the air, it left some potentially great work on the drawing board. And if they had a piece of creative they needed to cut down/compress, they might have relied on personal judgment.
This is where consumer neuroscience increasingly plays an important role for marketers. That’s because the current suite of tools combining EEG, eye tracking, facial coding and biometrics, along with self-report surveys, offer a unique opportunity. Not only can these tools measure and evaluate on a macro level (i.e., what works and what doesn’t), they go even deeper, providing moment-by-moment insight that can pinpoint where a spot(s) needs to be adjusted. The results enable a collaborative approach between marketers, creative agencies and researchers to help go from early stage to primetime success—avoiding the cutting-room floor that has claimed too many could-have-been-great ads. This is because consumer neuroscience measures what traditional research methods cannot. Methods like surveys can only tap into our conscious responses, which we know are often heavily biased and are only one, arguably smaller, component of how we consume media. Studies have shown that the majority of our decision-making happens non-consciously, so much of what drives everyday decisions—including what we’ll purchase, watch and talk about—requires tools that can measure these responses.
Several years ago, we developed a model designed to understand the explosion in content platforms and the types of creative that can be optimized for each. Our Brand Immersion Model became a framework for defining the relationship between the immersive platform of TV and digital’s flexible platforms. Our research found that TV, through its unmatched ability to create new, unconscious emotional connections, has the power to form need states—which make consumers receptive to brand messages—where none existed before. Flexible environments play a key role in reinforcing need states. So the two work together in powerful, synergistic ways.
It’s important to understand this relationship in order to develop creative that will be great on each platform. The Brand Immersion Model breaks down the two primary ways to engage with content:
Highly Immersive Platforms: Viewers are more apt to be passive participants, observing content that substitutes the viewers’ emotional state with the emotional lives of the onscreen characters. If those characters need a product, the viewer feels that same need. Examples include television, virtual reality, theaters and home theaters, IMAX and events like the Olympics. Immersive content enables us to experience others and generate need states that previously did not exist.
Highly Flexible Platforms: Viewers are more apt to be active participants, constantly searching for something that engages them. This content requires the need to already become established. The content or advertising then supports this need. Examples include smartphones and tablets with email, social media and the websites that provide a never-ending search for more. Flexible content enables us to develop our own experience and satisfy need states that already exist.
Television is highly effective as an advertising platform because it is the primary medium that can create a need state, either through experiencing the needs of the onscreen characters during the primary content or through the high emotional involvement with on-screen characters during the advertising itself.
With flexible experiences, individuals seek out an experience more customized to their interests. For the most successful executions, this can result in higher engagement with content than on an immersive platform because it’s tailored to what the consumer is seeking. The reason for this heightened engagement is that the content is user-generated—people seek to broaden their conversations with each other and trusted sources like influencers instead of with the stories of new characters in an advertisement. Unless the ad is for a product the consumer already knows that he or she wants at that moment and it takes up enough of the screen to get noticed without turning the viewer “off,” it cannot generate the same level of connection.
So how do you ensure that your creative and different platforms go hand-in-hand for the most optimal engagement? How can we move from must-skip to must-watch? And how do we turn turn-out into tune-in? It’s simple: tap into the full spectrum of consumers’ responses— both conscious and non-conscious—to uncover areas of emotional impact, visual hot spots, blind spots and inform the strongest possible creative development.
