Imagine it if you will, you’re sitting on your porch eating Catalina Crunch Cereal, and you look up and your neighbor is chirping away to a pair of seagulls who then respond to her. Next, a voiceover says, “The world is full of surprises—like getting cinnamon toast cereal without all the bad stuff.”

Pretty funny stuff, huh?

That’s what happens in the first nationwide brand awareness TV Campaign from Catalina Crunch.  With the help of SuperHeroes NY and System1, the keto-friendly cereal and snack brand created 30, 15, and 6-second spots featured across TV, social media, and CTV platforms, with a focus on amusing their audience.

To test and land on the right creative, SuperHero NY leveraged System1’s Test Your Ad platform to scale the campaign’s performance and determine how viewers felt about the creative throughout development. The goal was to connect data with creativity. Test Your Ad enables marketers and their agency partners to A/B test people’s emotional responses to creative, second-by-second, with custom reports delivered within 24 hours.

AdMonsters spoke with Krishna Kaliannan, Founder/CEO, Catalina Snacks, Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer, System1, and Susan Vugts, Managing Director, SuperHeroes NY, about the campaign. We discussed System 1’s Test Your Ad platform, how to market a campaign across different platforms, and the importance of collaboration. 

Catalina Crunch’s Creative Campaign Collaboration

AB: Catalina Crunch partnered with SuperHeroes NY and System1 for a creative cereal campaign. Why was this partnership worthwhile for your company? 

Krishna Kaliannan: We’re big fans of leveraging data to drive improvements. In Catalina Crunch’s early years, we learned that less than half (45%) of buyers were eating our cereal out of a bowl. Some were eating it from the bag as a snack, baking, or adding it to yogurt or smoothies. This insight led to the launch of additional snack product lines.  

So when we launched a broader awareness campaign, we also wanted to ensure we were partnering with agencies that understood data and creativity.

When we learned about the Test Your Ad platform, we recognized it as another way to capture valuable feedback from consumers so that we could create an ad they would enjoy. As a challenger brand, we aim to stand out among established competitors. Partnering with Superheroes as our creative agency that seeks to save the world from boring advertising and System1 has enabled us to be more creative and get real audience insights that shape the final campaign.

Testing Your Ad’s Effectiveness

AB: SuperHeroes NY used System1’s Test Your Ad platform to gauge how viewers felt about the creative throughout development. How does this product work, and why did you think creating it was necessary? 

Jon Evans: Nearly half of all advertising (48%) does not deliver long-term market share growth. Furthermore, many brands need clarity on which campaigns fail to engage consumers. We developed Test Your Ad, a platform that measures viewers’ emotional response to advertising because research demonstrates that the more people feel, the more they buy.

With Test Your Ad, advertisers and agencies can quickly and accurately predict the short-and long-term potential of creative, understand which specific elements are or are not adding value, improve their ad’s effectiveness through expert guidance and compare their ad to competitors’ commercials among our database of more than 80,000 ads.

Tell Me a Story: Scaling Ad Creative Across Channels

AB: While this is Catalina Crunch’s first TV campaign, the ads will be displayed across social media and streaming platforms. Do you find that marketing across different platforms changes your ad process? Do you have to market to audiences differently depending on the platform? If so, how? 

Susan Vugts: When developing our campaigns, we will always start with a solid creative strategy and build our story upon a vital human insight and a creative nugget that connects with people and can stand out.

For Catalina Crunch, this was the insight that something that seems impossible can be true. Like healthy cereal that tastes delicious or a neighbor that talks with seagulls in the Catalina campaign.

Based on this premise, we usually develop multiple executions per platform and audience because you must market to audiences and platforms differently. But we also ensure we have one overarching recognizable storyline and build distinctive brand assets such as packaging, color usage, and logo across all executions and platforms to build brand affinity. This is especially true for a challenger brand such as Catalina Crunch, which is building its brand and business. 

Optimizing Marketing Budgets Amidst Economic Uncertainty

AB: There is a reported slowdown in ad spend and a possible ad recession. What role should creative advertising play in combating this rough spot? 

JE: Many brands are looking for ways to stretch their marketing budgets further in the face of an economic downturn. Creative effectiveness is key to maximizing a brand’s advertising investment.

Creative effectiveness is key to maximizing a brand's advertising investment.

First, marketers must understand which of their current campaigns support brand building and which do not impact the bottom line. Ad testing can help reveal the effectiveness metrics so that marketers can allocate spend to the ads most likely to drive market share growth.

While some brands will inevitably roll out new ads during a recession, others may prefer to create savings by reinvesting in campaigns with high effectiveness metrics.

System1 has conducted extensive research on ad wear-out and has found no evidence. Audiences take more time with creative than marketers do. Advertisers can revive or repurpose older creative that tests well with audiences to reduce the need for an entirely new brief and production process.

Brand-building Ads Spark Emotion

AB: What advice would you give to advertisers to implement creative ads in their campaigns to help them drive revenue? 

JE: One of the main differentiators between ads that drive long-term growth and those that don’t is the former’s emphasis on right-brained features.

Advertising expert and author Orlando Wood outlines in his books — Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour. and Look out — the importance of appealing to the brain’s right hemisphere to drive mental availability. Right-brained features include:

• Melodic music
• Characters with agency
• A clear sense of place
• A scene unfolding
• Humor and dialogue

Brand-building ads spark an emotion in viewers, ideally happiness.

In comparison, Wood’s research finds that ads that lean heavily on left-brained elements, like rhythmic music, voiceovers, words on the screen, and freeze-frame effects, are less likely to drive long-term market share growth. Unfortunately, over the last nearly 20 years, there has been an increase in left-brained features and a decrease in right-brained features in ads. 

Advertisers must build briefs with the right and left brain in mind. Agencies are equally responsible for developing concepts focusing on storytelling and bringing rich characters and interactions into the mix. This creative will have a better chance of taking viewers on an emotional journey and driving long-term profit and market share growth. 

The post Catalina Crunch Campaign Shows How to Save the World From Boring Advertising appeared first on AdMonsters.

The usual holiday glitz we are used to seeing in holiday advertising may be less excessive this year, which can be expected living in such recessionary times. Nonetheless, one aspect of holiday advertising that seems promising is emotional storytelling.

System1’s Test Your Ad effectiveness measurement platform awards each ad a 1 to 5 Star Rating indicating the potential for an ad to drive brand growth. The Spike Rating highlights an ad’s short-term sales impact. Through tests, System1 found that the best holiday ads are the ones that evoke a little bit of sadness but then delight with a bright resolution by the end. 

This is great for retailers, but publishers should also take heed and strategize to find ways to include ads that evoke emotion contextually related to the content they publish. We spoke with Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer at System one, about the effectiveness measurement platform and its benefits for publishers.

Yakira Young: How does System1’s Test Your Ad effectiveness measurement platform work?

Jon Evans: System1’s Test Your Ad platform helps advertisers predict, understand, and improve the effectiveness of their advertising by measuring viewers’ emotional responses to the creative. 

By diving deeper into how ads make people feel, the associations they make, the speed at which they recognize the brand, and even their feedback on music selection, characters, and narrative, it enables brands to finetune creative so that they can put their most effective ad forward. For some brands, a particular campaign may focus more on driving online or in-store sales. For others, the main priority will be to support long-term brand building. System 1’s ad testing metrics predict how a particular ad will perform over the short and long term. 

YY: How can publishers benefit from placing ads on their websites that have an emotional journey? 

 JE: It’s important to take viewers on an emotional journey, as the more people feel, the more they buy. Sadness can be a compelling emotion for creating effective ads, but it’s crucial to avoid the ‘sadness trap.’ This requires resolving these feelings of sadness before the commercial’s conclusion. Aim to turn feelings of sadness to happiness, as it is the most helpful emotion for creating mental availability for a brand and guiding purchasing decisions.

Toyota’s “Celebrate Together” holiday ad is a perfect example of leaning into sadness, as we see a young grocery store employee working over the holidays and unable to spend time with her family. She goes out of her way to help her neighbors and show them kindness. Ultimately, they come together to ensure she is not alone for the holidays, ending happily. System1’s FaceTrace® highlights viewers’ emotional response to the ad, with sadness diminishing and happiness growing as the ad nears its conclusion.

Toyota – “Celebrate Together” – System1 FaceTrace® analysis

YY: We read that the top ad this year was a Christmas story from Hobby Lobby. Why do you think they were able to attain this victory?  

JE: Hobby Lobby’s holiday ad centers on two girls decorating their rival hot chocolate stand with supplies from the retailer. In a gesture of kindness, the more successful seller pivots to selling marshmallows to complement the other girl’s cocoa. The ad scored 5.3 Stars because it successfully puts the product at its center without its storytelling and ends positively. 

 Wegmans dethroned Hobby Lobby and is the new brand with the top US holiday ad ratings. The ad focuses on a young boy who clears leaves and snow from the yard and puts up Christmas lights. As he prepares a plate full of holiday food, we realize that he’s been completing these chores at his elderly neighbor’s house rather than his own. While Wegmans’ festive food gets a supporting role, the star is very much the cross-generational friendship. 

YY: I know that ads without heavy branding seem to rate highest considering they provide something a user can relate to as opposed to a “live ad.” Do you ever find heavily branded ads to test well on Test Your Ad? 

JE: There are certainly instances of high-performing ads with prominent branding – and there’s a way to do it well. For example, Nike’s successful formula involves montages of numerous athletes wearing Nike-branded gear or true emotional stories of individual players. While the Nike logo is always present, it does take a back seat to the overall narrative.

 Another example is when advertisers create a Fluent Device, a recurring character or scenario, which aids brand recognition. The red and yellow M&Ms are an example of a Fluent Device – they bring the branding front and center in the ad, but we still rely on the characters to tell a story and make us laugh. 

Ads that rely only on pushing branding and product may be successful at generating sales in the short term but likely won’t score as highly on the Star Rating scale, meaning they will do little in brand building.  

YY:  What is the correlation between showcasing emotional moments in ads and retail media? Are you finding that consumers spend more money when they are emotionally driven? 

JE: Tapping into consumers’ emotions helps brands in two key ways. First, emotional advertising supports long-term market brand building. As most people aren’t in the market to buy right now, advertisers need to think of ways to create mental availability in consumers’ minds. Emotion guides and simplifies decision-making. When brands produce emotional ads that leave a positive impression on consumers, these ads recall the future when they are ready to make a purchase. 

Second, the quality of advertising affects short-term sales potential. Ads influence how intensely we feel certain emotions. System1’s Spike Rating is based on emotional intensity and how quickly viewers connect a commercial to the advertiser. High emotional intensity and speedy brand recognition indicate greater short-term sales potential. For retailers, this typically results in consumers visiting a website or store, thereby increasing sales opportunities. 

It’s no wonder many advertisers lean heavily into emotional advertising around the holidays. The holiday shopping season is an important one for brands hoping to significantly impact year-end sales, and the right narrative in ads can encourage buyers to make purchases now and in the future.  

YY: Where do you see the future of emotional storytelling in ads?

JE: Emotional storytelling will continue to be important for advertisers to support long-term brand growth. System1’s recent Feeling Seen USA report demonstrates the value of diverse characters in emotional stories. We analyzed 58 US TV ads with 18,500 viewers that cast individuals from under-represented groups and highlighted diverse stories. The average Star Rating for US ads is 2 stars. The average of the ads tested for Feeling Seen is 3.8 stars. Thus, diversity-themed ads are considerably more effective with the general public than the average US commercial. ​

When creating stories, especially those that showcase diversity and inclusion or a purpose like sustainability, it’s important to feel authentic and relevant to the brand in question so they resonate with viewers. Ad testing can help reveal whether the ad is landing well with audiences and properly communicating its intended messaging. 

The post The Power of Emotional Storytelling in Digital Advertising appeared first on AdMonsters.