The secret to compelling advertising is an ongoing project but, thanks to advanced research techniques, it is possible to more fully understand which ad experiences best engage viewers.
FreeWheel has developed such a technique using MediaScience, a company that mines insights to improve the quality of ad experiences through FreeWheel’s Viewer Experience Lab.
Launched in 2023, this initiative is designed to help address, as Chris Glover, FreeWheel’s Vice President of Marketing explained, “an incredibly complicated industry. We're focused on very minute aspects of advertising technology but when we go home and watch TV we get annoyed, just like every other consumer.” Some of the biggest annoyances, he noted, include ad repetition, latency and, “unnatural creative breaks” that interfere with the content narrative. Such annoyances diminish not only the enjoyment of the programming but also the engagement of the advertising.
Although it is called a Viewer Experience Lab, it is not a lab per se. Rather it is more of a research approach. “We've partnered MediaScience which is an expert in neuro-marketing audience research and technology,” he explained. This includes viewing sessions where they can control the variables such as pod duration, latency and repetition both in home and at a mini lab facility. Testing includes, “Neuro metrics like heart rate, eye tracking, facial coding to truly understand how viewers are experiencing, how viewers are feeling when they view advertisements,” he stated. From there, insights are gleaned such as viewer sentiment on ads and branding KPIs, for example.
The results so far have led to both micro and macro insights according to Glover. On a micro level, with ad pods, for example, “we found that when ad pods were built with ads all of the same lengths, either 15s or 30s, viewers found the ad breaks shorter,” he shared. “So if they saw a pod with four 30s for a total of two minutes or they saw one with a 30 then a 15 and then another 15, the inconsistent pod would have felt longer to them.” The finding that pod consistency across ad formats leads to better viewer experience can be immediately applied in the field and should deliver better results.
On macro level, Glover has found that while advertising in general, “gets a bad rap,” it's not totally true. “Advertising has traditionally been thought of an annoyance and no one likes advertising breaks but we found there's actually a lot of positive sentiment for advertising particularly when the ads are relevant to the consumer.”
The ultimate takeaway upends a media shibboleth. “The ads themselves don't hurt program enjoyment. It's the bad ad experience. Our study found there was no change to program liking among viewers when there were ads present versus when there are no ads present and that alone is a very interesting data point,” Glover concluded.
So it’s not the ads that are the problem, it is actually the experience that gets in the way of ad enjoyment. “It's the ad repetition, the latency, the blank slate that viewers sometimes see. Those are the real problems of the industry and that's what we're shining a light on,” he noted.
Ultimately, the Viewer Lab has been designed to improve three major areas of advertising – Quality of ads, Quantity of ads and Relevancy of ads. For each of these important pillars of research, FreeWheel has designed whitepapers, the last of which, Relevancy, is due out soon.
The goal through all of this research effort is to help guide advertisers and content providers as to the most effective and engaging ad delivery methods. “We're never going to be prescriptive to a publisher, saying, ‘Hey, you should do it exactly like this.’ It's more insights to help them as they look at their own ad strategies,” he explained and added, “What are some things they can do, such as creative diversity, remain really, really important. But any light that we can shine to provide best practices about how they're ultimately delivering advertising to consumers and planning and selling their advertising, we think is very valuable.”
For Glover, “Advertisers have a lot of choices and they can buy advertising in a lot of different environments. I would advise them to not lose sight of putting themselves in the viewers’ shoes. We advise advertisers to work with trusted partners who are putting this issue first.”
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
Artwork by Charlene Weisler
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