It’s one thing to get people in the door. But how do you persuade them to stay? Sure, big budgets and long flight times can skew basic viewership numbers, whether that’s your good ol’ pageview or dwell time metrics. Great. You’ve achieved the first important stage of engagement – attention.
But if a brand is investing time and money for content and storytelling, the end goal is to achieve ‘active attention’ – to give people all the ‘feels’, whether that’s making them curious, empathetic, surprised, happy, contemplative or even fearful.
Why emotional storytelling works
At a time when all our attention spans have become so short they are measured in seconds, the ever elusive ’emotional engagement’ is what makes someone do a double take when they see a brand. It’s what makes them remember, care and, ultimately, buy.
Emotional engagement leads to active attention, which leads to brand loyalty and purchase intent. And it’s the basis of much consumer neuroscience research, going back to the late 1990s, when scholars Tim Ambler and Tom Burne hypothesised that emotional storytelling activates deeper brain centres, encoding memory more powerfully than facts alone. It’s what Pinterest, in partnership with Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, revealed in its survey last year showing that ads generating positive emotional responses improved active attention by 50 per cent.
Think back to school when your teacher told you that creating little stories around important numbers/data/facts will make memorisation that much easier and longer lasting. This is because an emotional response, rather than just a factual one, is more likely to leave memories and different associations in the brain, which will positively impact decision-making later.
Be a drama queen
Our brains love stories because they are easy to digest and remember. And to get the message to stick, a little drama – the artful rise and fall of a story arc – goes a long way. One powerful way to inject drama into a storyline is through humour. In fact, a study by market research company Kantar showed that humour is the most powerful enhancer of ad receptivity from Gen X to Gen Z.
Mixing the potency of humour with a taste of the unexpected unlocked emotional engagement with the audience for our recent campaign for Türkiye Tourism, “Detour Türkiye”. Here, the BBC StoryWorks team (the in-house creative brand studio of BBC Studios) created a travel documentary-led campaign that detoured away from the country’s traditional tourist spots to visit its lesser-known destinations – all while peppering some ‘LOLs’ along the way.
The science of emotional engagement
For this campaign, the mix of humour and surprise proved to be an effective source of escapism for audiences looking for some relief from the doom and gloom of the news cycle. By using BBC Studios’ proprietary emotion and attention measurement tool, Science of Engagement, we were able to assess the emotional impact of our content on attention levels and brand perception.
Using biometric tools developed with third-party experts, such as eye tracking and facial coding, we measure expressions and eye-fixation while viewers watch branded films on a laptop, mobile or tablet. At BBC Studios we have been developing our Science of Engagement campaign measurement model for some years, based on principles uncovered by psychologist Paul Ekman who identified that facial expressions characterise emotional states. The approach gives us unique insight into how audiences are responding to the content that we create.
Through Science of Engagement, we were able to retrieve granular details of how our audience interacted emotionally with the travel films. For example, the humorous ‘Skewer Showdown’ section, including scenes illustrating kebab rivalry, attracted interest and intrigue — ultimately resulting in a strong sense of ‘Surprise’. Notes of humour used in revealing the Anatolian origin of Santa Claus generated a sense of ‘Positivity’, while ending one film on Türkiye’s spirit of adventure raised a mix of emotions and piqued ‘Deep Thought’, leaving viewers feeling ‘Curious’.
The measurement exercise also revealed broader learnings for the client in terms of brand sentiment, trust and purchase intent. After experiencing our content, the audience’s likelihood of travel to Türkiye increased by 53 per cent, and 51 per cent of those exposed to the content were more likely to view Türkiye positively.
Putting emotion at the forefront of travel content
When it comes to travel and place branding, our approach has been to think about the destination as a character in its own right – imbuing it with a distinctive personality through an insider’s lens from the people who know it best: the locals.
And that led the creative direction for our award-winning travel campaign “A West Midlands Welcome” for The West Midlands Growth Company. While being a dynamic and vibrant pocket of Britain, the West Midlands is often not well-known to travellers coming to the UK. So we were tasked with shifting this brand perception and travellers’ agendas too.
At the heart of our film-led campaign lay the people of the region. With a cast of high-profile locals like Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi, and Michelin-starred chef Glynn Purnell, we featured characters from all walks of life reflecting the region’s humour and humility.
This alchemy of a human-led narrative and regional flair got a strong positive emotional response from our audience. The analysis of the Science of Engagement study conducted on the campaign showed that the film drove one primary emotion – ‘Happiness’.
In particular, the fast-paced ending showing a montage of all the characters featured in our story demonstrated a peak in ‘Happiness’ right before the logo was shared. The film also ranked in the top 3 per cent for Happiness on the BBC benchmark.
When it comes to storytelling, emotion is – in the immortal words of Boston – more than a feeling. It is the spark that grabs attention, the glue that makes memories last, and the driver that turns curiosity into action. And with the right tools, we can now prove it.
By Jihane Rassasse, Vice President, Content Partnerships, MEA, Turkey and the Mediterranean, BBC Studios and Jainnie Cho, Vice President, BBC StoryWorks, BBC Studios.
