Asia Insight’s latest innovative framework FaceTsTM, based on Facial Recognition Technology, reveals strong positive emotions in StarHub ads
Smile! Your screen is watching you! With over 50% of buying decisions based on emotions, how does one keep track of consumers’ negative or positive emotions towards product ads?
Using Asia Insight’s latest innovative framework FaceTsTM, StarHub is now able to analyse and monitor facial movements of its consumers while they are actually watching ads, allowing real-time tracking! Enabled by Facial Recognition Technology, FaceTs TM includes an automatic facial decoding tool that captures true-to-millisecond emotional responses of consumers watching ads.
Among one of the first companies in Singapore to pilot this new innovative research technology, StarHub has constantly been exploring new ways of engaging its customers, particularly in the emotional space. It has been revealed thus far that StarHub ads are highly engaging and resonate well with Singaporean consumers.
To gain a better understanding of their brand positioning, StarHub partnered Consulting Group – Asia Insight Pte Ltd, a market research and business consulting firm, using its cutting-edge facial coding technology framework, FaceTsTM to evaluate its video advertisements.
StarHub wanted to understand how their ads could drive emotional attachment with their brand. “Hence, we posed questions such as ‘What are the moments of truth that resonate with the target audience?’ and ‘What executional elements trigger positive emotions?’” explained Mr Ng Chong Hin, CEO of Asia Insight. “In recent experiments conducted by behavioural economics academia, there is overwhelming evidence that human decision-making and behaviour is very much driven by the subconscious and emotions.” Added Mr Ng, “Yet many research companies currently rely on conscious self-reporting.”
“StarHub has been positioning its brand in the emotional space, particularly in Happiness. Traditional advertising research techniques such as focus groups and surveys have failed to capture the desired happiness emotional effects of our brand ads,” commented Mr Darren Choo, AVP of Social CRM and Market Research, StarHub. “We had evaluated several techniques from neuroscience to avatar-based alternative research tools and decided to use Asia Insight’s facial recognition framework FaceTsTM. It removes the cognitive and behavioural economics biases such as ‘group think’ in traditional research techniques, yet it remains cost effective and scalable even to larger sample sizes.”
About the Study
Participants included customers using various telco service providers, as well as StarHub Sparklers and StarHub Community members. Using regular web cameras, participant’s spontaneous facial expressions were captured while being shown video ads.
These expressions are then decoded into 6 categories, using the work of celebrated psychologist *Dr. Paul Ekman. Blow-by-blow emotional responses to each ad were analyzed and summarized into an overall engagement score. Benchmarked against a global database of readings, StarHub ads such as “Family Time: Selamat Hari Raya” and “Mother’s Day #AddMumOnFacebook” outshone other ads, with 9 out 10 feeling engaged throughout. For example, using the FaceTsTM approach, we were able to pinpoint the exact scenes in the “AddMumOnFacebook” video where emotions spiked. The results showed that the twist in the plot at the end and fun approach utilized were very successful in reaching out to audiences.
Themes like happiness, community bonding and family time were popular with participants across the ads, said Mr Choo, “The results proved very interesting and diagnostic and unveiled insights that were previously unknown using traditional methods. Story telling skills in the right velocity in the story line were shown to be an important component in eliciting the right emotional response.The study of facial expressions using Asia Insight’s FaceTsTM approach confirmed our thrust in the selected themes that proved to resonate with the target audience.”
*Paul Ekman is a pre-eminent psychologist and co-discoverer of micro expressions with Friesen, Haggard and Isaacs.
About Consulting Group – Asia Insight Pte Ltd
Asia Insight is an independent full-service market research firm that offers a wide range of services throughout Asia. It is reputed for providing world-class research since 1996. Built on a dedicated team of research consultants, we house well respected moderators in Asia. Conducting customized research across Asia on a daily basis, many of our urban and rural studies continually uncover lifestyle insights not limited to major cities, but often reaching out to many lower-tier cities.
Collectively, our founders have over 40 years’ client-side strategic marketing and global experience, and the trust of many long-term clients is testimony to the solid quality of work that we provide. Over the years, our strategic insights have helped local and international companies embrace their potential within Asia and throughout the world.
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