According to the company, NewsIQ UK will capture the preferences, opinions and emotions of News UK’s audiences and will allow brands to target campaigns based on the emotional and attitudinal states that will drive optimal advertising engagement and emotional loyalty.
New research commissioned by News UK from Professor Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics demonstrates the powerful potential of this approach. In an in-depth experiment with News UK’s readers, people who had read an emotionally arousing piece of content – whether positive or negative - and then interacted with a video advert were 45% more likely to view the whole advert than those who had been exposed to non-arousing emotional content. Similarly, readers who had consumed content that they defined as ‘pleasurable’ and then interacted with the advert were 32% more likely to watch the complete video ad than those who had been exposed to non-pleasurable content, said News UK.
NewsIQ UK will enable brands to plan, optimise and report on their campaigns using first-party declared insights built around preference, opinion and emotion data. For example, continues News UK, a travel brand might want to target audiences who have declared a preference for outdoor pursuits, whose opinions are linked to a sense of exclusivity, who over-index for video consumption and respond with positive emotions to adventure stories.
By enabling brands to understand consumers’ preferences, opinions and emotions, NewsIQ will enable them to develop campaigns that drive emotional loyalty based on a real connection between the consumer and the advertising message. The platform will also help brands to move their focus away from simple click metrics to more brand and attention focused measures, letting them optimise campaigns towards primary brands goals such as time spent with brand or total reach of target audience.
Operating under the umbrella of News Corp’s broader NewsIQ product, NewsIQ UK will also enable targeting across the international portfolio of News Corp titles in the UK.
Ben Walmsley, Digital Commercial Director, News UK, said: “NewsIQ UK builds upon the traditional approach to digital advertising by recognising that audiences are people, driven not just by who they are and what they do, but by what they think and feel. Preferences, opinions and emotions are fundamental factors in driving behaviours and the ability to identify these states and then build campaigns around them is going to change the way that advertisers communicate with audiences.”
“The sort of emotional loyalty that we believe this platform can help create is far beyond loyalty based on pricing or familiarity. True emotional loyalty is about creating a psychological connection between the consumer and the brand and understanding the consumer’s preferences, opinions and emotions is a vital step in building that relationship.”
Professor Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, said: “It’s long been known that any form of emotional arousal prepares you for action. When you experience a strong emotion, your body prepares itself to react and it is this trigger that creates the connection between emotionally powerful content and enhanced advertising engagement.”
