Sam Stanford

I feel like taking an emotion angle is always a great way to get people involved. People love talking about things that they are passionate about. If brands can use that to their advantage then they should, so that they can get more people the share their feelings and ultimately share their experiences with the brand. Of course if a brand is going to align with a cause they should try to make it be something that relates to the brand in my opinion and I mainly feel that way so that they don’t confuse consumers about what they stand for.

Sam,

First, Great post. Second, thank you for not posting the ASPCA Sarah McLaughlin gig because I can’t think of a time when I’ve seen it and haven’t subsequently choked up. I think your arguments are spot on. It’s clear that engagement derived from heightened emotion is successful, however the correlation between unrelated content/engagement and the product or service being advertised should definitely be a concern for brands.

I think brands that choose to utilize the emotional angle could apply a strategy that focuses around the product or service. I’ve seen emotional campaigns in which a product or service isn’t even shown until the last 5 seconds of a video. Consistent product placement could perhaps alleviate this issue. It seems as though engagement in a vacuum simply isn’t enough.

In my opinion engagement should never be used as the key indicator in if a campaign is successful. Just because the ad itself was popular is not enough, there’re more then enough emotional ads that I remember yet the product the ad itself was selling becomes lost. When you rely to heavily on playing on peoples hearts strings you may loose sight of the goal of your ad. Marketing Magazines states “But I worry that their thinking over-emphasises the role that emotional brand messaging plays in the overall buying process, and this over-emphasis in turn leads to advertising that isn’t as effective or compelling as it could or should be. I worry that this approach wastes precious budgets when it comes to using advertising to help build a brand.” Pointing to the fact that emotion can cause great engagement but may have little effect on changing consumers buying behavior.

I am assuming the goal of the S.P.C.A was to get their message out in a way to compel people to donate. The success measure is donations. They used video views as an indicator for donations assuming those likely to view would donate. The S.P.C.A success metric was dollars raised not engagement. What if the video was viewed a million times and they got zero donations? If the campaign success was measured by engagement then you would have to say yes it was successful even though it did not help secure funds. The engagement metric, video views in the scenario, is really just an indicator. My other issue is that engagement is too broad a term and can be interpreted and spun to tell any story. There is very specific key interaction being measured in your example video views. Engagement could translate to hundreds of other interactions, many of which would not be an indicator of success in this example.

Good points, all. To more succinctly summarize my initial point, I think in the instances of these non-profit causes, “engagement success” seems much more directionally significant in terms of conversion for the advertised brand than in cases where a more traditional brand (e.g. Thai Life Insurance) puts forth a highly emotional campaign that stokes intense engagement, making the “causes'” brand engagement a more potent success measure.