In the context of marketing, resonance generally means that the ad makes a cognitive/affective connection with specific members of the audience. RMT (a company I co-founded) defines two types of resonance:
- The degree of subconscious motivational alignment between the ad and specific audience members (this is close to the traditional definition). RMT calls this ad-person resonance.
- The degree of subconscious motivational alignment between the ad and the media context. In the past the words “alignment” and “congruence” were the most used terms relating to this similarity between ad and context. RMT calls this ad-context resonance.
Between 1960 and 2014 there were at least 70 studies on the ad-context alignment phenomenon done and most of them proved that if you put a funny ad in a funny show, you can expect a 15% increase in ad recall. I had been tracking those studies since I got into the business and always wondered how many different attributes besides “funny” one could use in determining the alignment between an ad and a context.
In a very large 1997 field study for which my 1990s company Next Century Media won an Emmy®Award in 2022, an early proprietary AI system plus machine learning plus set top box data were used to identify 265 psychological variables which determine program choice. Since 2017 there have been seven third-party studies proving that these RMT resonance scores predict and drive double and triple-digit increases in the sales/branding effects of advertising.
Others have used various methods in the recent past and present, and some, such as Marketcast, also use the word “resonance”. Marketcast, which measures the memorability and likeability of ads in both pretesting and post evaluation, uses the word “resonance” in its generally accepted meaning of ad-person connection, and their metrics (ad recall, message recall, brand recall, ad likeability) are taken to be the measure of the degree of resonance which has been achieved.
Neuro-Insight has done studies in which the literal plus sentiment similarity between the ad and context (as judged by content coders) was proven to increase brain memory encoding by +49%.
Magid’s Emotional DNA uses emotions to code programs and Horizon and others on the buy and sell side use these in media selection, presumably in an effort to maximize the resonance between the ad and the program. In an NBC study using questionnaires, lifts in ad recall and other measures as high as +14% were found as result of higher levels of emotional resonance between ad and context as measured by Emotional DNA.
Wurl uses AI-based emotional resonance between ads and programs to decide where to insert those ads, and has found ad recall lifts as a result, in the range of all other such studies in the past.
All of these methods used by RMT, Marketcast, Neuro-Insight, Magid, and Wurl work to make advertising more successful. We recommend testing all of them against sales and branding effects. The minimal cost of testing is strongly justified by the known very substantial increases in ad recall and sales and all other funnel measures, depending on the method. Media selection which does not use any method of including impression quality is on its way out. The recent surge of attention measurement for the purposes of better media selection and better ad creation opened the door which will not be closed. RMT is happy to partner with all other companies, including those that measure sales effect, or resonance, or attention, or drive to search/website/store traffic, to maximize the return on investment for brands and for content marketing. RMT’s current partners are listed here.
Here is a chart that summarizes the companies measuring resonance according to many of the relevant dimensions. We will update this chart if we receive new information.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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