Clear brand involvement raises emotional impact of ad content

Transparent involvement of brand, well-executed and clearly labelled content and integration of brand with the narrative are among key factors emerging from a study seeking to understand the emotional impact of content-led marketing by measuring consumers' subconscious reaction to campaigns shown on BBC.com.

The study titled "The Science of Engagement", conducted by the in-house insight team of BBC Story Works - the content marketing arm of BBC Advertising - in partnership with facial coding experts CrowdEmotion, combined traditional research metrics with facial coding to understand how brands can use content-led marketing to effectively engage with consumers.

Transparency and quality were revealed to be the most important factors in engaging the audience. Also, exposure to content-led marketing can greatly improve consumers' positivity towards the advertising brands, with a 77 per cent increase in explicit positivity from pre- to post-exposure. The research included a sample of 5,153 digital consumers of English language international news across Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the US, Canada and Germany.