At BrainJuicer, we believe that emotions drive all our decisions as humans and consumers. So when it comes to assessing communications programs in marketing, the most important predictor of behaviour is the consumer's emotional reaction to the message.

We are not alone in this perspective.

Les Binet and Peter Field in their analysis of the IPA DataMine (Marketing in the Era of Accountability) have shown that emotional campaigns are more profitable than rational campaigns, generate more business effects than persuasion or information-based campaigns and that, even in what are considered rational categories, emotional campaigns are more effective than rational campaigns.

• In our experiments, we have shown the level of emotional response towards an ad is strongly correlated with its eventual success in market - both in terms of ROI and other business effectiveness measures.
• Emotional response (and happiness) is strongly correlated with important measures such as persuasion and relevance, but is a more complete and reliable measure of effectiveness, especially when emotions are at the heart of the campaign.
• In some categories, such as financial services, persuasion and relevance are much poorer predictors of brand consideration than the viewer's emotional response to the ad.

CommScan is BrainJuicer's approach to testing ads and communications based on these beliefs

Three different approaches exist depending on whether you would like to:

• Screen early stage creative (ad-cepts, storyboards, animatics, stealomatics, landing pages etc.)
• Test a campaign
• Test fully finished ads

Central to CommScan is our award-winning FaceTrace™ tool which uses faces to measure emotion.

FaceTrace™ tells us:

• The emotion evoked (happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt) or, importantly, whether nothing is felt in response to the ad, resulting in neutrality which translates to inaction.
• The intensity with which any emotion is evoked.
• The trigger for the emotion - captured by our open-ended MindReader™ technique.

We can test adverts in real time, minute to minute. We can test elements like visuals and sound overlays. CommScan can be delivered faster and more cost effectively than your traditional communication evaluation processes, with richer more actionable emotional diagnostics.

CommScan is just one of the reasons that our 'Chief Juicer', John Kearon was awarded the 2008 GreatMind/Research Innovator Gold Award, by the Advertising Research Foundation.

Click on the “see how we can help” button, call us or contact us here to determine how consumer insight derived from CommScan can optimize your advertising and communication progress.