Advertising with Feeling: The Important Role of Emotion in Advertising
One of our favorite phrases at System1 is “the more people feel, the more they buy.” Behavioral science teaches us about the important influence that emotions have on decision making. Emotion’s impact on consumers’ attitudes towards brands and their purchasing decisions is why emotional measurement is the foundation of System1’s Test Your Ad platform. Emotion is an accurate predictor of business outcomes, both in the short term and long term.
What do we mean by emotion?
Through a series of studies, psychologist Paul Ekman uncovered strong evidence of seven universal emotions across a variety of cultures. The first six came in 1972, with another addition in the late 1980s. Ekman reached these conclusions by showing a series of images featuring different facial expressions to people and asked them to name the emotion. Consistently, people used the same terms to name these emotions.
Based on Ekman’s work, we refer to these universal emotions as happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and contempt. We also add neutrality – more on that later!
System1’s FaceTrace® tool collects responses from audiences who watch ads to generate a second-by-second map of their emotional journey. By visualizing these emotional responses, brands can pinpoint the moments that resonate most deeply with audiences and understand areas where neutrality may be suppressing emotional engagement.
Ekman’s Seven and One More for Good Measure
Let’s take a look at the ways that brands have successfully leveraged these universal emotions, and the impact that neutrality, a lack of feeling, has on advertising.
1. Happiness
Here’s a finding that will bring a smile to your face: happiness is the emotion that is most strongly associated with long-term brand growth. Brands that know how to successfully elicit feeling often aim for happiness because they want to make audiences laugh and smile.
Aldi are experts at making audiences feel happy. The brand has a long history of 5-Star results at Christmas, scoring ‘Exceptional’ results across the board on short- and long-term potential as well as strength of branding.
Aldi achieves high levels of happiness by crafting strong narratives rooted in cultural references like Willy Wonka and Mission Impossible, featuring their beloved Kevin the Carrot character and his increasingly expansive cast of friends and family, and leaning into humor at every turn, including innuendos that work for both adults and children.
2. Surprise
Surprise is another positive emotion that we track. While not quite as powerful as happiness in the long term, surprise can delight audiences, especially when working in close collaboration with happiness.
WeatherTech’s recent Super Bowl ad is a masterclass in surprising people, in a good way. The ad features a cast of elderly women going on a wild ride in their convertible, spray painting a truck, break dancing and more. It’s an unexpected series of events for this demographic, but a welcome surprise for audiences. The ad scored an ‘Exceptional’ 5.2-Stars, putting it in our Top 10 Super Bowl ads of 2025 and ‘Strong’ on short-term sales potential.
With so many details in the mix, viewers are rewarded by repeat viewings but will likely feel less surprise on these occasions, though happiness is sure to still be felt.
3. Neutrality
What do the majority of ads have in common? They make people feel nothing. For the average UK TV ad, 52% of responses are Neutral. In the US, the situation’s a little better, but at 47% Neutrality is still by far the most common response to an ad.
This is exactly why System1’s Test Your Ad platform gives respondents the option of selecting neutrality after watching or listening to an ad.
Adam Morgan, Peter Field and System1’s Jon Evans explored the issue of neutrality in their joint research, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull. The report raised the alarm about the problem of ‘dullness’ in advertising, the immense cost of creative that lacks entertainment value and strategies for breaking free from boring advertising.
Want to dive into the issue further? We wrote a blog recapping the Cost of Dull in more detail.
4. Sadness
The best, most effective emotional journeys are dynamic. They leverage moments of tension, failure or conflict to keep audiences engaged with the narrative that is unfolding.
Our FaceTrace® technology showcases different potential routes that creative can take. An ad may start out strong but be overtaken by negative emotions that it can’t recover from. This is a weak emotional journey. An effective journey shows positive emotion continuing to build to a peak at the conclusion. But an even more effective journey is one where negative emotions bring tension to the middle of the storyline, then find a resolution by the end.
One of the most common negative emotions that brands expertly tap into is sadness.
Toyota’s “Jessica Long Story” is one example of this in action. The brand highlights the story of Paralympian Jessica Long and her adoption story. The FaceTrace is an incredibly dynamic one, with a large spike in sadness when her parents are notified of a genetic condition that will require her legs to be amputated. Clips of adult Jessica swimming as she’s cheered on and her parents reaffirming their interest in raising the child see the sadness dissipate, replaced with feelings of happiness.
We also see this strategy pay off for Dogs Trust. Many charity and non-profit ads fall into the sadness trap, unable to resolve negative emotions with positive ones due to the sensitive subject matter. One ad from the rehoming and rescue charity portrayed a man and his dog. After losing his job, the viewer gets the impression that the man has had to surrender his pet, but these feelings of sadness are quickly laid to rest when his dog jumps into his bed in the morning like usual.
5. Fear
As we explored with sadness, moments of tension and negativity can help create compelling emotional journeys that enable brands to tap into memory structures that are essential for long-term commercial growth. When used sparingly and balanced with a satisfying resolution, these emotions build a richer narrative and draw audiences into the action.
In some cases, fear may be a deliberate strategy. In others, fear may be an unintended result (even more reason to pre-test creative!). Either way, fear needs to be well balanced with positive emotions. Our Test Your Ad Premium database of more than 150,000 ads reveals those which have higher percentages of fear but still perform well on our effectiveness metrics.
Carnival Cruise Lines’ “Funderstruck” campaign featured an ad that showcased an on-board roller coaster, with guests soaring above the ship and the sea below. In these moments, we see fear come into the mix. Overall though, the ad scored ‘Good’ on long-term brand-building potential (Star Rating) and ‘Strong’ on short-term sales potential. All this with just the right amount of fear – nearly 5%. It’s not too much to derail the positive, fun vibe that Carnival intended.
6. Anger
Anger can be an incredibly useful driver of short-term sales potential, as long as it abides by the peak end rule. If audiences are made to feel angry over an issue being presented in your work, like a lack of funding for school resources, or angered by a scenario, such as a character in the narrative cheating or stealing, these feelings must be resolved by the ad’s conclusion.
Google’s “Dear Sydney” ad for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games sparked a lot of public discussion about the role of AI in our lives. So, we put the ad to the test with consumers. The first half of the ad, focusing on a dad and daughter and her fandom for an Olympian, sees a steady rise in happiness. When the Gemini AI solution is mentioned, negative emotions like anger and sadness begin to creep into the response.
The negative emotions never dominate, and the ad has enough momentum to land a 4-Star score without them damaging the final result too much. But the ad’s peak of happiness is the moment before AI gets involved. The positive feeling the audience felt is despite the AI content, not driven by it. They like the human-centered elements of the story, but not the idea of AI writing a letter, which is meant to feel personal and authentic.
7. Disgust
Disgust is one of the rarest emotions in advertising, typically accounting for just 1% of emotions. But that doesn’t mean it’s an ineffective emotion to tap into. Often, brands do everything they can to avoid grossing out audiences, but Pot Noodle proves that risk taking can provide a big payoff.
The noodle brand created one of the spikiest campaigns of the year, as evidenced by its ‘Exceptional’ Spike Rating in System1’s testing, a measure of short-term sales potential. By leaning into a distinctive slurping sound, the ad recorded the highest percentage of disgust of all UK ads in 2024 at 30%. It demonstrates that any emotion is more powerful than none, aligning nicely with the Cost of Dull findings. The ad was also featured in our list of the Nation’s Favourite Ads of 2024 along with many other brands that made people feel happy, sad and everything in between.
8. Contempt
Ads that elicit a high percentage of contempt in audiences rarely recover from this negativity trap. But, as we’ve noted above, it’s more important for people to feel something as opposed to nothing. After all, short-term sales potential is driven partly by creative’s ability to elicit intense emotions, both positive and negative. So, let’s take a look at an ad that that elicits a range of emotions, including contempt, happiness and surprise, as well as a below-average level of neutrality.
Mountain Dew’s Super Bowl LIX ad featuring singer Seal as a literal seal, singing an adaptation of “Kiss from a Rose,” was one of the most-talked-about commercials of the big night, and the longer version ranked in the top 3 ads for short-term sales potential. It was well branded and drove intense feelings.
Create with Confidence
Want to pinpoint which emotions your work is eliciting in consumers? System1’s Test Your Ad platform predicts and improves the effectiveness of your creative by showcasing the emotional response journey of the audience and identifying the Reasons for Emotion. We help marketers Create with Confidence by pinpointing the elements of your ad that are working well and identifying where small edits may yield big brand-building gains.
Plus, our Test Your Ad Premium database contains more than 125,000 ads, giving you a deeper understanding of your category and the emotional impact of your ads and your competitors’ work.
Don’t miss our Spotify playlist, filled with songs that tap into every emotion! You’ve been forewarned, Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ is in the mix.