Interactive Advertising Bureau
04 June 2019

IAB Europe Research Awards 2019 - Making 6 Seconds Count (Teads)

Making 6 Seconds Count

Teads

Awards: Digital Advertising Formats (Winner)

Project summary
Two thirds of digital media effectiveness is driven by the quality of content (Nielsen Catalina, 2017). At Teads, we are committed to helping brands evaluate their creatives for digital devices before they invest in media. We have partnered with Realeyes to develop Teads ‘Creative Lab’ to assess the performance of creatives and optimize them before the start of their advertising campaigns.

Teads Creative Lab has traditionally focused on longer form content (15-30 second adverts) but as more and more brands are using 6 second content as part of their media plans, Teads decided to commission a study with Realeyes to measure their impact and explore the relatively new area of 6 second content.

“The explosion of short form content caused by the emergence of mobile and erosion of consumer attention have changed the rules of the game. We have to learn how to tell brand stories in shorter formats, and get ready for even shorter formats in the near future” (Mars)

We were able to create some key creative take outs and best practices that our advertisers can use to ensure they are building emotionally engaging short adverts. 

1. Objective(s)
The challenge with 6 second adverts is to tell a compelling story in a very short time frame.

The questions we wanted to answer with our study are: How 6 second adverts are performing and how we could make them work harder at driving emotional engagement and impact? We could then use these insights to provide best practices for our advertisers. We wanted an innovative research project that would ensure we provide our advertisers with expertise in this area, and to also benefit consumers of digital video adverts. 

2. Methodology
As we wanted to assess the emotional impact of 6 second adverts on mobile specifically, we needed to ensure we had a robust study and to be the first of its kind to be done large scale on this topic. Therefore, we tested;
● 166 creatives
● 75 brands
● 10 countries

We asked our advertisers to submit their most engaging 6 second adverts, ensuring all our key business verticals were represented.

The measurement methodology was a facial coding test followed by self-reported questionnaire delivered to the Realeyes online panel. Our sample was Adults aged 16+, N=12,000 respondents

3. Key results
If you specifically design your creative with the 6 second format in mind (as opposed to just using a cut down version of a TV advert) and build a story in this time frame, we found it can still be engaging

• Adding packshot enhances impact and desire to know more
• Captions drive higher emotional response with sound off
• Funny ads drive better engagement
• Music isn’t necessarily a winning strategy

6 second advert formats require concision and discipline, and they need to be kept simple - all components must be there for a reason and play well together, to drive impact. 

4. Impact and Application
Realeyes measures emotion through facial coding, their technology captures the micro-movements of the face through the webcam of a user watching an advert and uses computer vision and machine learning to analyse them, focusing on expressions of happiness, surprise, confusion, disgust, engagement, and behaviours such as how and when people move their head.

There are four emotion metrics they use when testing creative;
● Attraction (gets attention)
● Retention (holds attention)
● Engagement (elicits momentum through any emotional expression)
● Impact (leaves a lasting positive impression)

Realeyes provide an EmotionAll® score which is an over-arching 1 to 10 performance indicator combining all four metrics, relative to Realeyes database of over 16,000 videos.

At Teads we’ve already tested over 210 creatives globally with an average score 3 out of 10. This clearly calls for more content pre-testing to help optimise creative assets and to inform media investment decision.

As a result of testing 166 creatives across 10 markets we were able to create some key creative take outs and best practices that our advertisers can use to ensure they are building emotionally engaging short adverts. From a global perspective, 6 seconds is also a perfect time frame to create adverts that can transcend markets if the narrative allows for it.

From our findings, we are briefing our advertisers, creative and media agencies with how they can ensure their 6 second adverts work harder at driving emotional engagement.

5. Significance
We have been able to influence the way our advertisers think about their digital advertising and provide them with best practices to ensure that the digital advertising business is as effective as it can be. We want to ensure that in our premium environment users get the best experience, and therefore this research has enabled this – it allows us to provide expertise to our advertisers, while also ensuring users of our publishers benefit from better digital adverts.

Click here to view research project

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