MONACO – Social video platform Unruly Media is launching new tools in the new few weeks to better track and measure the emotional responses to viral videos. The goal is to help agencies and marketers attach a framework and metrics to social video so it’s not just a once-a-year proposition, says Scott Button, founder and CEO of the company, in an interview with Beet.TV at the Monaco Media Forum.
“We’re looking at emotional responses to video around 18 different emotional states, and we can do panel testing at enough scale in the pre-testing phase before a campaign goes live so we can give good feedback to clients as to how effective the content might be,” Button tells us. This analytical insight into what makes content shareable has been one of the missing links in the field, and brands have been asking for more science and rigor in understanding the performance of social video, he adds. Over the last 12 to 18 months, Unruly has been studying the specific emotional triggers in social video ads and how they correlate to views and other metrics of success.
However, the next step in social video data and insight will come in understanding how the creative and content leads not just to views but to sales, he explains. “We will see a move away from view count as the hallmark of success to how the word of mouth sparked by a campaign is impacting sales,” Button says in this video interview. “One of the big challenges for brands right now is to try to understand how to make viral video more predictable and repeatable. There is little value to brands if they can only get it right once a year,” he says.
Unruly was founded in 2006 and delivers and tracks social videos across the Web. Since launch it has delivered 1.65 billion video views for more than 2,000 social video campaigns for more than 400 brands, including Evian, T-Mobile, and Old Spice. The company has also been conducting regular research into social video. For instance, the just-launched creative optimization tool tests which version of a video performs best against target audiences, allowing clients to optimize against shareability, word of mouth, duration, dwell time and other metrics. Unruly also relies on its “Social Video Lab,” to test physical and emotional reactions to social videos using biometrics and other metrics.
Earlier this year, the company worked with a researcher to study the rise in brand recall and purchase intent when a branded video had been recommended to a viewer or shared, and Unruly has also delved into specific industries such as automotive to analyze what makes certain automotive branded videos a hit.
-Daisy Whitney
