• by Aaron Baar , April 7, 2015

In these days of attention fragmentation, it’s tempting to come at consumers with high-energy, high-excitement advertising to get a message across. But there are some cases where that approach can actively work against a marketer’s goals. 

According to a new study conducted by professors from Columbia Business School and Oxford University’s Said Business School, high-energy, peppy advertising is less engaging when consumers have just watched an emotional drama. Though previous research has looked at how media-induced emotions influence consumers’ opinions of ads, the new study looked at how activation levels (or, the energy associated with certain emotions) influenced responses to certain commercials.

“When you experience an emotion that's low in arousal, and you then watch a commercial that’s highly energetic, you spend less time watching it,” says Keith Wilcox, Columbia Business School professor and co-author of the study, which was recently published by the American Marketing Association. (Nancy M. Puccinelli, of Oxford University’s Said Business School, was the co-author of the study.)

For it, researchers showed one group of people an emotional clip from the 1979 movie “The Champ,” in which a young boy weeps over the death of his father, while another group watched a clip from a documentary about Albert Einstein. Different subgroups of these audiences were then shown two different commercials — one high-energy, and one moderately energetic — for the same company. The viewers who had watched the emotional scene from “The Champ” spent less time watching the highly energetic commercial than the moderately energetic commercial. The Einstein group (who were considered to be in a neutral activation state) spent the same amount of time with both commercials.

Based on those results, the study concludes consumers experiencing a deactivating emotion (such as sadness) while watching a program will respond 50% more favorably to a moderately energetic commercial than a highly energetic one. And, because many ads are created without specific knowledge of a surrounding program’s emotional content, marketers might fare best by creating more moderately energetic ads than highly energetic ones, Wilcox says. 

“There are a lot of places where you can’t predict [low activation],” Wilcox tells Marketing Daily. “If you run commercials that are ‘moderately energetic,’ that at least won’t work against you.”