The Business of Emotions
Whatever your outlook on the holidays, one truth persists: they bring an annual deluge of adverts enticing, begging, and seducing you to buy, buy, buy. But not all ads are created equal.
With more and more advertisers having big budgets and longer lead times, why are some spots more effective than others? Perhaps because some haven’t fully clued in to the magic ingredient for a successful holiday campaign: emotion.
The most effective holiday ads make you feel, something which is the first step to making you buy something. Because how something makes us feel is far more impactful than the logic-based thinking surrounding it, emotionally driven marketing has the power to turn emotional responses into profit drivers. Holiday advertising tactics have their place in all this, but if brands are going to bother with tools like native advertising and content creation, it’s wise to do more than focus on their products.
Facts certainly have their place in advertising, but they’ll always take a back seat to a stirring emotional response from your audience, and there’s data to prove it. A study cited in Brand Immortality found that emotionally driven campaigns were more profitable than strictly rational ones at a ratio of 31:16 percent, and still slightly better than campaigns that combine emotions and facts (31:26 percent). Emotions are irrational but powerful, and further, they are the primary driving force behind purchase decision-making.
Brands have begun rolling out their 2017 holiday campaigns and there are definitely a few bright stars in the mix heeding the golden rule. There’s this beautiful black & white Waitrose spot. This sweet ad from M&M’s. This push for inclusivity from Samsung, a funny take on this all-too-familiar holiday nightmare from Audi, and this modern Christmas fairytale from Debenhams. And for the more light-hearted brands out there, not all ads have to take the “magic of the holidays” sentiment. A few years ago, KFC showed us that comedy can work just as well as sap for a spot to make a splash.
As the December month rolls on and we begin the annual holiday madness, we’re excited to see which brands lead by example in the realm of emotional content that lands. But we know you, dear consumers, will be the best judges of that.
The Tomorrow of Advertising
Agencies used to be the gatekeepers of industry creativity. They produced high-level work and managed the talent behind it. It was a self-contained ecosystem in which an agency was your only option for your advertising needs. But with the arrival of the digital revolution, creatives have found homes elsewhere and the full-service agency model is being compartmentalized into hyper-focused, smaller operations, often in the form of small content shops and in-house studios. This new model, while a threat to some of the long-standing traditional agencies, is a dream for brands and clients. They can now tailor their needs down to the very teams that handle their work, drawing upon freelance and specialized content creation talent.
Publishing houses such as Vice, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed are leading the growing trend of establishing in-house branded content studios. Whatever growing pains they may be navigating, with content strong enough to win business away from traditional agencies, it’s a time of adapt or die for many. While revamping internal structure is so clearly the best course of action, it’s not the easiest one to take. Many long-standing agencies have built their name and business model on a process that has worked for them for decades. Perhaps for those institutions, integrating content specialists into their existing operation is a more palatable option.
Call us non-traditionalists, but this latest industry shakeup doesn’t rattle us and we don’t think it should rattle others either. In a time ripe with emerging and multifaceted talent, when advertisers and brands are bolder and more ingenious than ever before, couldn’t this time be the catalyst for better and more substantial ads? A time to bring in fresh blood, take risks, and push the whole industry into the future?
If you don’t believe us, we’ll leave you with Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco’s take: "Here’s the way I see it: The difference between old and new media publishers (or traditional and digital-native publishers, if you prefer) is that, while both struggle to stay afloat, some new media companies just don’t quite realize it yet." Here’s to us all surviving the media apocalypse.
Photo credits: Les Anderson (top post) and Paul Frenzel (bottom post)
