Emotions can be a great way to gauge your audience.
But are emotions strong enough to base your video ad campaign on?
In the past, we’ve discussed the importance of making an emotional appeal (pathos) to your audience. If you’re making a video that largely depends on a call to action, it’s important to engage your audience on all fronts.
The best of corporate videos don’t just speak to our emotions. They stimulate us intellectually and appeal to our sense of moral duty. No matter the brand, a corporate video ad with heightened emotion can elicit a strong response from just about any viewer.
It’s why ads are now targeting user emotion online in an effort to better reach their audiences (quite unsurprisingly, given the insurmountable amount of information available to landing sites and online trackers). Now, companies are in a great position to target you – the subjects – for their corporate video ads.
According to Mashable, the targeting of emotions is relatively harmless. In fact, companies can only perceive emotions and are unable to gauge how their target demographics truly feel on a day-to-day basis.
“It humanizes the consumer and it brings to the forefront behaviors and attitudes,” says Alanna Gombert, general manager of trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau’s tech lab. “In some ways, it’s the right thing to do. It equates to a person and not a targeting item.”
In other words, it’s a company’s best attempt to speak directly to their audiences and let them know that they hear them. And most of the time, consumers are aware that they’re being marketed to. The question then becomes: is it manipulative to know and cater to your audience’s emotions? Marketers have had a long history of accusations when it comes to messing with people emotionally. Is targeting ads based on feelings of “loneliness”, “unworthiness”, or “defeat” fair?
It’s tough to say.
We’re in an age now where “mood marketing” has become popular. It’s not just corporate video ads; music streaming apps like Spotify allow users to create music playlists based on how they feel. GIFs are geared towards user emotion as well.
With corporate video, it might be worth studying the effects of your previous corporate video strategies. What sorts of comments were users leaving? What was the lasting impression on how it left viewers feeling? And ultimately, how can you use that information to create your next corporate video strategy?
Here at Key West Video, we work with our clients to come up with the best, most effective corporate video campaigns as possible. For more information on how we can service you, visit our website today!
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