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

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 all know attention matters, but not all attention is equal. Ultimately, the success of campaigns depends on inspiring the audience and creating positive attention – where the brand feels relevant and its message is actually welcomed. BrandDiscovery’s emotions-based targeting ensured our ads and the content were aligned – delivering positive attention for our client, and outperforming the KPIs of our CTV campaign strategies.

Matthew Kramer

Former Head of Brand Investment
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.

In the competitive attention economy, BrandDiscovery shines a spotlight on the critical role of contextual targeting in ensuring that advertising messages reach audiences ready to receive them. Using their emotion targeting, we were able to generate significant lift in performance metrics ranging from brand awareness to cost per engagement.

Matthew Kramer

Former Head of Brand Investment
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, a subsidiary of S4Capital plc, provides digital marketing, content, and advertising services to agencies and brands. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, they help their clients convert ideas into successful digital growth, ensuring they stand out in a fiercely competitive and quickly changing market.

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.
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