Monks’ use of emotion targeting boosted engagement and out-performed other strategies

Overview

By using Wurl BrandDiscovery to target CTV inventory that matched the emotional tone of their ads, Monks drove increased brand awareness and purchase intent, and cut their client’s cost per engagement in half.

Challenge

Optimizing brand lift metrics in CTV campaigns

Monks was tasked with executing a CTV campaign for a financial technology company that wanted to broaden its audience, improve brand awareness, and stimulate purchase intent. To meet the brand’s growth objectives, Monks needed to reach an engaged audience that would resonate with the brand’s message, through a measurable and scalable media source.

While Monks had an ideal customer profile in mine, they wanted to validate their targeting strategy and explore innovative strategies that could drive even better client results.

We’ve been really focused on outsized value, thinking about how our media can be bought differently, how we can work with innovative partners such as Wurl to make our media be more impactful, be smarter, and resonate further with the consumer. One of the ways that we’ve found a lot of value and simplicity in working with Wurl is you’re combining actually a lot of different technologies into a single solution. So we don’t have to necessarily go to six different measurement partners or DSPs, SSPs, and mix and match them all together. It’s a single point of solution.

Victoria Milo

SVP, Media Solutions and Emerging Technologies
Monks

Solution

BrandDiscovery provided Monks with cost-efficient contextual targeting at scale

Monks teamed up with BrandDiscovery to run targeted CTV ads across Wurl’s network of premium content publishers. They kicked off the campaign with a plan designed to reach their ideal customer profile. While this produced an improvement in brand lift, they wanted to experiment with new targeting strategies that could further optimize campaign results. Following the advice of Wurl’s team, they applied BrandDiscovery’s newest solution, emotion-based targeting. This approach aimed to enhance viewer engagement by more seamlessly integrating ads with video programming, creating ad breaks that felt like a natural continuation of the content rather than a disruption.

BrandDiscovery uses GenAI to evaluate the emotions in both ads and program content. By analyzing video content just before an ad break, BrandDiscovery enables scene-level content alignment with the advertiser’s ads, at no additional cost to the advertisers. This allowed Monks to achieve precise contextual targeting without extra markup on the cost of the media placements.

Results

Emotion-based targeting produced positive attention and optimal results

Working with independent measurement partners, EDO and Kantar, BrandDiscovery provided Monks with full visibility into their campaign performance.

Kantar’s study showed that targeting audiences based on the emotional context of scenes significantly improved campaign effectiveness. Specifically, when compared to a control group, emotion-based targeting combined with genre-based targeting increased the campaign’s brand awareness by 33%, improved brand favorability by 28%, and boosted purchase intent by 15%. It is worth noting that the 33% lift in brand awareness was 5x the lift observed in earlier campaign periods before emotions targeting was applied, and significantly outperformed industry benchmarks.

Further supporting these findings, EDO’s analysis conducted across 12 million delivered impressions found that ads that matched the emotion of video segments were 200% more effective at driving keyword searches or site visitations than non-matching ones.² This underscored the effectiveness of emotion targeting not only in grabbing audience attention in the moment but also in encouraging meaningful engagement and action-based outcomes after the ad was viewed.

In summary

Emotion-based targeting drove positive attention and halved Monks’ cost per engagement

BrandDiscovery empowered Monks to optimize targeting and placements for more meaningful brand engagements. They found that aligning the emotions in their ads with the content made commercials feel like a natural extension of the viewer’s programming, increasing the likelihood of the ads being watched, remembered, and ultimately, acted on.

By perfectly timing their ads with CTV programming, Monks enhanced the impact and resonance of their client’s brand messaging, leading to improved outcomes and reduced advertising costs. This was demonstrated by a significant lift in aided brand awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent, while dramatically decreasing the cost per engagement.

For as long as probably advertising has been around, we’ve been always talking about delivering the ad at the right time, the right place, and the right person, hyper-personalization, making sure that the consumers connected with the ads. But now emotion, because of the technology that’s available to us today, is really not going to be optional in the near future, in my opinion.

Victoria Milo

SVP, Media Solutions and Emerging Technologies
Monks

¹ Kantar: 11/13/2023 – 11/22/2023, compared to 5-year industry benchmarks for Lending brand impact studies
² EDO: 11/1/2023-11/22/2023

Monks is the global, purely digital, data-driven, unitary operating brand of S4 Capital plc. With a legacy of innovation and specialized expertise, Monks combines an extraordinary range of global marketing and technology services to accelerate business possibilities and redefine how brands and businesses interact with the world. Its integration of systems and workflows delivers unfettered content production, scaled experiences, enterprise-grade technology and data science fueled by AI—managed by the industry’s best and most diverse digital talent—to help the world’s trailblazing companies outmaneuver and outpace their competition.

Looking for a less disruptive ad experience?

Wurl’s BrandDiscovery classifies CTV content in real time, improving performance by matching ads to the context of what’s shown on screen directly before the ad break.

Discover how