Tracking eyes and faces

№ 10

Harvard Business School Journal

October 2011

CREATING ONLINE ADS WE WANT TO WATCH

By Carmen Nobel

For millions of TV watchers, the commercial break is an annoyance of the past, thanks to the fast-forward button on their digital video recorders. Consequently, advertisers are turning to the web, where popular sites such as YouTube and Hulu force us to watch a brief commercial before playing the video we really want to see.

But assuming a captive audience on these video sites may not make online marketers more effective at reaching consumers. Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Thales S. Teixeira notes that it's just as easy for viewers to tune out the 15- or 30-second ads preceding online videos by simply turning away, opening another browser window, or chatting with someone. "It's not at all hard to avoid an ad online even if you can't technically skip it," he says.

Teixeira argues that a viewer's attention cannot be purchased by an advertiser but must be gained by the ad. Thus, he is helping advertisers to make online video ads so riveting that users want to watch them. His experimental research looks at the emotional components that both attract and hold the attention of viewers.

The stakes for advertisers are huge. Americans were exposed to over 5.3 billion online video ads in July 2011 alone, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at more than 963 million, according to data from comScore. So Teixeira's research certainly has major implications for marketers, who spent $1.42 billion on online video advertising last year in the United States, an investment expected to jump 52 percent to $2.16 billion in 2011, according to analytics firm eMarketer.

Tracking eyes and faces

To help advertisers up their return on these investments, Teixeira conducted a series of experiments in the HBS Computer Lab for Experimental Research. The results showed that the key to success in grabbing and holding the attention of viewers lies in evoking a carefully timed mixture of surprise and joy. (The findings will be published in an upcoming article in the Journal of Marketing Research, "Emotion-Induced Engagement in Internet Video Ads," coauthored by Teixeira and fellow researchers Michel Wedel of the University of Maryland and Rik Pieters of Tilburg University.)

The researchers paid 58 adults to watch a four-minute sitcom clip, followed by a series of 30-second consumer product advertisements. Out of 28 ads, 14 were chosen because they were decidedly provocative; the researchers expected them to evoke either joy or surprise in the viewers at different points in the brief plot. The other 14 ads were meant to be emotionally neutral; these were played between other ads as emotional buffers—sort of palate cleansers for the soul. Participants could watch an ad until the end or skip to the next one by pressing the space bar at any time.

In each case, a camera recorded participants' facial expressions as they watched the ads, while an infrared eye tracker unobtrusively measured their eye movements. The researchers parsed the camera data with the help of computer vision software that evaluated emotional response based on variations in facial features.

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