Does Human Presence Actually Impact the Success of Ads?
For as long as brands have created ads, many have included human presence by featuring celebrities, athletes, activists, and more to either make their messaging more impactful or to connect with their target audience.??
While their intent and reason behind adding human presence stem from either their opinions based on professional experience or comparing historical performance data, the question about the impact of human presence on overall ad effectiveness still remains unanswered.?
Before we get into understanding the value of human presence in ads and the impact it has on success metrics like ad recall and purchase intent, let us first define human presence in ads and its different dimensions.?
Defining Human Presence in Ads?
While the term ‘human presence’ is self-explanatory, we cannot ignore the fact that this element comes with various dimensions like gender roles, emotions, overall presence, movements, and more. How a character is portrayed in an ad in terms of their emotions, facial expressions, body language, speech, etc. impacts the intensity with which the message is delivered to the audience. ?
To understand its impact on ad effectiveness, we have categorized its presence in the following three distinguishable categories:?
Character presence is simply the presence of humans in an ad – the brand choosing to deliver their message with the help of humans instead of animations and other objects.?
Gender representation can be defined as the use or representation of different genders by highlighting their characteristics which, according to WHO, are socially constructed. We also want to highlight the fact that gender representation in ads is dynamic, and it is going through a transition as the socially constructed genders are getting redefined.?
Emotions are mental states caused by neuropsychological changes associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and degrees of pleasure or displeasure. Emotions are as universal as oxygen in our environment which makes them an impactful communication tool for brands to connect with the viewers.?
In the next few sections, we will be exploring the impact of individual elements of human presence on the success of ads based on our in-depth analysis of the top 10 and bottom 10 ads of historical Super Bowl data using Incivus – our creative intelligence platform.?
Note: For those interested in knowing more about our methodology, resources, and platform used for the study, we have added all the necessary information towards the end of the article.?
Exploring the Effectiveness of Character Presence?
One of the foundational pillars on which our society is constructed is the fact that people trust people which also explains why the oldest strategy in the marketing book, word-of-mouth, is still the most effective in driving potential customers further down the purchase funnel.?
While the advancement in technology has opened plenty of doors and windows of opportunities for brands to market, people still rely mostly on their friends, families, influencers, and review sites with genuine reviews for their purchases. The factuality of this statement can be backed by the rising influencer marketing industry wherein even the biggest brands like Dunkin’ Donuts, Gymshark, and Chipotle are partnering with influencers to add more human presence to their brand.??
Similarly, including human presence in ads becomes one of the ways to anchor the audiences’ attention and trust in the brand.?
Based on our analysis of the top 10 and bottom 10 Super Bowl ads, the top 10 ads had shown humans for 70.1% of screen time and the bottom 10 ads showed humans for 53.9% of screen time. What enhanced the impact of human presence in the top Super Bowl ads was the focus on a single person in a shot. Over 70% of the screen time of top ads was focused on a single person whereas in the bottom 10 ads 45% of the screen time had 2 or more characters. One of the bottom 10 ads was by Heinz named Find the Goodness which had over 3 people in almost all the frames cluttering the screen as well as the messaging and driving down the overall recall of the ad.?
(Source: The Drum)?
According to Maximilian Riesenhuber, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience and senior author of the study called ‘Is the brain wired for faces?,’ the human brain has learned to distinguish faces (as a particular group of objects) very well which means they will recognize, distinguish, and most probably remember a human face over other groups of objects like plants, buildings, etc.?
It can be concluded that ads with human presence or frames with humans have higher recall than the ones without them.?
This brings us back to the fact that just elongating the screen time of humans in ads might not be enough to improve the ad recall. How humans are presented on the screen also matters which is why in the next two sections we will be exploring the impact of gender representation and emotions on the success of ads.?
How Does Gender Representation Affect Ad Effectiveness??
In a world where there is a continuous debate around gender identity and representation, it is difficult to start measuring their impact on ad effectiveness. While not impossible, gender representation does bring along a certain level of complexity to the topic and therefore, to the impact it leaves on the viewer.?
In our analysis of gender representation in Super Bowl ads, almost 50% of ads with a human presence had male only presence whereas 10% of the ads had a combination of males and females. Only 16% of ads had female only presence which goes to show how under-presented females are in the ads for this particular sport. And we might find the same disheartening results in the ads for other sports as well.?
Having said that, to come to a point of measuring the real impact of gender representation on ad effectiveness, we must first understand the gender-specific problems like stereotyping and biases wherein brands and agencies, while representing a particular gender, put them in certain roles, depicting a certain set of emotions. For instance, masculine ads usually convey power, strength, virility, and competitiveness whereas for the longest times, women were shown in traditional and domestic settings, and it has only been a few years since women are being represented in roles and settings other than the domestic setting.?
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To be clearer, we are not saying only the females are misrepresented or stereotyped in ads, even the males are highly stereotyped and put under certain labels that might not resonate with them.??
Again, the topic and the gender itself are not black and white which means there are not just males and females – there are many people who identify with genders that are not male and female who are also under-represented in the advertising industry.?
The surface level solution to gender representation problem might be to be more inclusive and diverse with the casting but the true solution would be to, first, investigate and deeply understand the difference between biological and cultural aspects of different genders. And then to be more accepting and inclusive of different genders and their representation in the advertising.??
Emotions – Connecting People with Ads?
Emotions connect us all – while every person has subjective experiences, they still experience them within a set of universal emotions like happiness, sadness, disgust, neutrality, fear, etc. Most brands display a range of emotions to add a narrative to their ads which then allows them to explore their brand personality as well as add an additional dimension and a certain degree of depth.?
While it can be a common deduction that positive emotions like happiness might engage the audience positively whereas negative emotions like sadness or anger might disengage them, our Super Bowl ads analysis revealed that the ‘surprise’ emotion also decreased overall ad engagement. Bottom 10 ads showed negative and surprise emotions for almost 45% of the screen time whereas top 10 ads had a limited screen time for these emotions.??
The emotion and the element of surprise is commonly used by advertisers to connect with their audience and place their brands at the top of their minds. As effective as this emotion is, if not used in the right context and amount carefully, it can leave a negative impression. According to a research paper named ‘To Surprise or Not To Surprise Your Customers’ by Adam Lindgreen and Jo?lle Vanhamme, while surprise being an effective relationship-based marketing tool for advertisers, advertisers need to be aware that some situations are more suited for using surprise than other situations.?
For instance, one of the bottom 10 Super Bowl ads was Bank Heist by Quibi in which the most dominant of emotions displayed was surprise. Since the element of surprise followed the entire 30secs ad, it became hard for viewers to follow the story line leaving the messaging unclear.?
For readers who want to dive deeper, here is the emotional profile of the top 10 Super Bowl ads:?
?And the bottom 10 ads’ emotional profile:?
The emotional profile of ads might impact more than brands think to the overall effectiveness of ad campaigns. Curating emotional profile while developing ad concepts can help a brand create an impactful story that resonates highly with their target audience leaving a lasting impression in their minds.??
Key Takeaways for Brands?
Methodology & Resources?
Historical Super Bowl ads comprising of 60+ commercials that include 53 brand ads, 7 trailers and 2 political ads. The brand ads were scored between 4.1 to 7.0 on the USA Today Ad Meter study. Based on the Ad Meter ratings, we evaluated the top 10 and bottom 10 ads on our creative intelligence platform, Incivus, with an objective to identify the impact of human presence on overall ad effectiveness.?
Top 10 Ads?
Bottom 10 Ads?
Resources:?
Note: The human presence analysis of the ads for this particular study was limited to two genders – male and female and no additional dimensions like ethnicity, color, etc. was considered.?
About Incivus?
Incivus is a creative intelligence platform that helps marketers predict the success of their campaigns before they go live. The platform enables marketers to evaluate their display and video ad creatives on various attributes like recall, attention, brand cues, ad copy, music, emotions, and more.??
Incivus is built on a solid foundation of artificial intelligence trained varied ad performance and human behavioral datasets.