What makes an ad "go viral"?

Super Bowl 50 is upon us, and we couldn't be more excited…about the ads!

The market for pre-testing of advertising is estimated at nearly 2 billion dollars (with the actual spend by advertisers several multiples higher than that). And this year, each 30 second ad spot in Super Bowl 50 is estimated to be selling for 5 million dollars.

With that much at stake, why is the ad testing market so woefully poor at predicting which ads will be successful before they air?

Part of the problem is the heavy reliance on measures of conscious consumer attitudes. Another part of the problem is the tendency to measure consumer evaluations of the ad itself rather than measuring the impact of exposure to the ad. Perhaps it won’t surprise you then that when you solve those two problems, your ability to predict the success of an ad increases significantly.

In 2015, the Sentient Consumer Subconscious Research Lab illustrated this with an exhaustive study of all of the Super Bowl 49 national advertisements. We measured the conscious and non-conscious impact on impressions of the brands advertised in each spot and then used that data to predict whether an ad would "go viral" by analyzing the relationship with online views, shares, mentions etc. Furthermore, we gathered the ratings of the Super Bowl ads from the ever popular USA Today AdMeter and used those to predict the social contagion of the ads as well.

The results showed that the USA Today AdMeter ratings of the ads had a modest correlation with the social contagion of an ad r=.35 (p< .05). When we added an advanced measure of the conscious impact of the ads on perceptions of the brands, the correlation rose significantly r=.43 (p<.05). That’s good news for conscious measures.

However, when we added the Sentient Prime measures of non-conscious impact of the ad, the correlation with actual in-market social behavior rose to r=.63 (p<.05).

These findings clearly illustrate that conscious measures are only telling part of the story. In addition, we see clearly that measuring the impact of the ad has a predictive advantage over simply measuring attitudes toward the ad itself.

But, what was the winning combination of variables that predicted whether an ad went "viral"? It's not enough to make a reason based argument to consumers. It's not enough to simply be emotional in your storytelling. The key is to make an implicit impact on consumers who self-identify with the brand. Essentially we need to emotionally touch the people who feel personally connected to our brands - ads that accomplish that are much more likely to "go viral".

To hear the full story of that fascinating test – you can watch a video presentation here.

We’re running scientific experiments on the implicit impact of the Super Bowl ads again this year. Watch this space to see who scores the greatest emotional win.

And, go…marketers! You’re working in the industry that provides the fundamental spice of life.