Leveraging Synergy and Emotion In a Multi-Platform World

ABSTRACT The proliferation of media platforms raises questions among marketers about their relative value. This study tests a neuroscience-informed model of immersive-versus-flexible audience engagement and demonstrates television's heightened ability to sustain nonconscious emotional response over online viewing. Employing biometrics and eye tracking, 251 participants experienced 24 brands on television, online, or both. Findings indicate that brand advertising proved far more emotionally engaging when experienced on television alone or combined with online viewing. This emotional connection using both platforms proved strongest when the television program and Web site content were related. The results support prior research that demonstrates television's ability to engage and sustain emotional response.


INTRODUCTION
Consumers are experiencing media across an ever-increasing number of channels, platforms, and locations at an unprecedented rate. Simultaneously, audiences have gained more control over what, when, and how they consume media.
Although this creates challenges for understanding and reaching consumers, it also offers an opportunity to engage consumers as never before.
Marketers now have an extraordinary number of outlets with varying degrees of complexity and context through which to connect with consumers.
With so many choices, how can a rational and effective strategy emerge that utilizes messaging within and across multiple platforms to break through the clutter?
Fortunately, advances in technology, research techniques, and knowledge arising from the human sciences continue to evolve at a similarly rapid pace, particularly in the increased understanding of the role of nonconscious emotional responses in human behavior (Bradley, Codispoti,  The proliferation of media platforms raises questions among marketers about their relative value. This study tests a neuroscience-informed model of immersive-versusflexible audience engagement and demonstrates television's heightened ability to sustain nonconscious emotional response over online viewing. Employing biometrics and eye tracking, 251 participants experienced 24 brands on television, online, or both. Findings indicate that brand advertising proved far more emotionally engaging when experienced on television alone or combined with online viewing. This emotional connection using both platforms proved strongest when the television program and Web site content were related. The results support prior research that demonstrates television's ability to engage and sustain emotional response.
• This integrated consumer neuroscience study offers evidence for a media model based on the type and degree of brand immersion. It shows how different, rapidly growing audiences approach, experience, and engage with content on television and online.
• Results show that emotional engagement with unfamiliar brands is higher when first seen on television than online. Increased engagement translates into a nearly threefold advantage in post-exposure brand resonance, a biometric measure of brand equity.
• The results also inform synergistic media planning to maintain brand equity with television while enhancing brand engagement within related online content. This model can help develop more effective strategies that embrace the changing media landscape and deliver greater ROI.
There are, in fact, multiple findings from modern neuroscience that can and should be applied to marketing in a complex world: • The emotional centers of the brain process information from the senses prior to the cognitive centers and exert considerable influence on the conscious processing of information; • emotional responses direct attention, enhance learning and memory and, ultimately, influence behavior; • many aspects of emotional influence occur without conscious awareness and are highly dependent upon the context in which they are experienced; and • the emotional centers occupy distinct areas of the brain-areas that lack direct connectivity with the language centers-making accurate self-report of the role of emotion to complex stimuli extremely difficult (Bechara and Damasio, 2005;Eagleman, 2011;Gray, 2004;LeDoux, 2002).
How can this increased understanding of the brain and the role of nonconscious emotional responses from studies generated by mostly basic science academics help media and marketing researchers decipher the rapidly evolving media landscape? The authors designed the current study to offer evidence for a new media model based on this current understanding of the brain-a model that has the potential to explain how different audiences in varying motivational and mental states might approach, experience and, ultimately, emotionally engage with media and marketing content. • How could neuroscience help brand marketers and the advertising industry understand how and why audiences engage with various screens and platforms?
• What types of experiences are they looking for online versus on television?
• What is the impact of choice of media platform on viewers' exposure to and experience with advertising?
Such questions suggest that prior understanding of consumer engagement is no longer adequate given numerous changes in how consumers are exposed to media. Indeed, there continues to be a need for new models with utility to help frame research questions and inform corporate strategy.
The proposed model is based on previous academic work and Innerscope's prior biometric and eye-tracking research on thousands of consumers and audiences as they experienced a wide variety of media content, advertising units, and platforms, including television, online, print, and radio (Treutler, Levine, and Marci, 2010

METHODOLOGY The Brand Immersion Model
The BIM is grounded in the belief that platform characteristics, viewer goals, and the interaction between the two have an impact on viewer experiences.
Consumers' experience of media and advertising varies, in part, as a function of the immersiveness and flexibility of a viewing experience. Some platforms allow for more immersion than others.
Further, some platforms tend to be used for specific goals (e.g., movie theater), whereas others are used for multiple goals (e.g., laptop). Thus, the experience of media content and advertising is expected to vary across platforms.
The complex intersections of media content, platform characteristics, and consumers' motivational states result in viewing experiences that can be more immersive or flexible. In addition to impacting the overall viewing experience, differences in how immersive or flexible a viewing experience is will affect the manner and degree to which consumers engage with advertisements and brands.  Interactive, or flexible, viewing experiences occur when the platform features provide viewers with explicit control over the content they are exposed to and how that content is experienced. For example, viewers surfing the Web may select content; start and stop content; discover and follow content (e.g., "This looks interesting"); and pursue goals (e.g., "I want to watch funny clips with cats in them").
A number of platforms connecting to the Internet can be used by viewers to explore content-rich environments in which the viewer can select content that serves existing need states. It also is easier for them to disengage from content and avoid content that is unrelated to their current goals. This is consistent with prior research demonstrating that control processes are more involved in more flexible media environments (Pavlou and Stewart, 2000).
The scientific theory of flexible engagement suggests that flexible environments allow for predominantly "top-down" processing, relying more heavily on the rational and cognitive centers of the brain that are involved in purpose driven, goaldirected behaviors and somewhat less on the brain's emotional centers. In contrast to immersive engagement, flexible engagement demands voluntary task switching; limited stimulus availability; and selective attention under an increased cognitive load (Arrington, 2008;Lavie, 2005). Flexible engagement involves planned action and reaction as consumers control their goal-directed activity to seek out information through media experiences.
The BIM proposes that advertising in a flexible environment competes with a wide variety of non-advertising content and finds the user in a fundamentally different state of engagement-a flexible state where information and storytelling are experienced in a more fragmented and nonlinear fashion. In such instances, content and advertising have less potential to generate emotional engagement and have more competition for attention and emotional processing. This is of little surprise given that consumers tend to use such devices in a goal-directed manner, and it is unlikely that the goal would be exposure to advertising content.
As such, users may consciously or nonconsciously avoid advertisements that are not related to their current goals, directing their attention toward more relevant information instead.
Conversely, environments that generate flexible engagement have the potential to fulfill goals and need states related to information seeking; extend brand engagement with interactions through social media exchanges; and in some cases lead users to directly purchase products or services. Flexible media consumption involves a self-activated experience. In flexible environments, the users are the directors and producers of their experience as they seek fulfillment of emergent needs and those that already exist. From an advertising perspective, as the consumer creates his or her own experience, they fulfill existing need states and supplement (rather than supplant) their own reality to satisfy their needs. Indeed, there is already some evidence that television advertising that drives consumers to self-select exposure to advertisements using flexible media platforms can be highly effective (Parpis, 2010).
It is important to note that no viewing experience is completely immersive or completely flexible. Viewers at an IMAX can leave the theater, go to the bathroom, or turn away from the screen. Similarly, a viewer may watch television or movie content on a laptop without surfing other sites or starting or stopping the content.
Thus, when describing platforms it is best to consider them as "more" or "less" immersive and flexible, respectively. Innerscope defines emotional engagement as "attention plus emotional intensity" (Marci, 2006). "Attention" can be defined and measured in multiple ways. For the purposes of this study, the authors defined visual attention per advertisement as "total time spent in fixation measured using state-ofthe-art eye tracking technology." Emotional response is measured biometrically by four channels of medical-grade, biologically based activity: heart rate variability, skin conductance level, respiratory response, and movement (Marci, 2006). These measures are combined using patent-pending algorithms. In short, emotional engagement with advertising is said to have taken place when an emotional response occurs while the viewer is directing his or her visual attention toward the advertising content. The primary goal of this research was to examine the following questions raised by the BIM: • Does the relative level of emotional engagement with advertising differ when brands are experienced on television versus online?
• How do television and online differ in their ability to create emotional connections to brands after exposure to advertising creative on each platform as measured by biometric brand resonance?
• Are the differences in impact the same for unfamiliar or newly introduced brands versus familiar brands?
• What is the impact of combining television and online advertising synergistically on the ability to create brand resonance? • heart-rate variability as measured using single-lead electrocardiography delivered a raw ECG signal used to calculate the inter-beat interval at the millisecond level (these data were sampled at 256 Hz continuously); • respiratory response as measured

Brand-Resonance Score
The brand-resonance score was measured as participants were positioned in front of a computer screen after engaging in their television and/or online experience. • One-third (Brand-and-Program Synergy) were exposed to television advertisements for six familiar U.S. brands embedded in a FOX program ("Glee" or "Family Guy") and then exposed to online rich-media advertisements for the same six brands embedded in the

Results
For the synergy phase of the research, Innerscope and FOX hypothesized that seeing an advertisement in an immersive environment created an emotional connection to the product or brand that carries through to the online environment.
Thus, the more the online experience reflected the original immersive environment, the greater the potential was for engagement with the advertising for the audience, particularly for the same brands. The results largely support these hypotheses.
When comparing the three groups from Phase 2 indexed to the Online-Only condition, the Brand-Only Synergy condition in general-interest context (i.e., same brands on "Glee" and USAToday.com) generated higher biometric intensity, visual attention, and brand resonance than Online-Only. In addition, the Brand-and-Program Synergy condition in programspecific context (i.e., same brands on "Glee" and FOX.com's "Glee" Web pages) showed an even stronger effect across the outcome measures.
Brand exposure during a popular FOX program, followed by an online exposure to the brand within the vertical Web site related to the same FOX program, created a synergistic effect that increased visual attention and emotional response to the advertisements, and carried over to the brand-resonance experience.
Similar to Phase 1, differences in the Online-Only versus the Television-Only groups were most notable for visual attention, though Television-Only also was significantly higher for biometric intensity. Interestingly, the Brand-Only Synergy in general-interest context was not significantly higher than Television-Only across outcome measures (Table 1 and Figure 3).

DISCUSSION
The widening array of digital-media platforms has given viewers the ability to consume media content in a variety of ways for a number of purposes. The authors believe that the current study is the first of its kind that uses biometrics and eye tracking as a measure of the nonconscious emotional impact of media-platform synergy for advertising of major brands.
They also believe that the results provide initial validation for the neuroscienceinformed BIM. Immersive environments trigger "bottom-up" processing driven primarily by the emotion centers of the brain with the potential to reinforce or create new need states, whereas flexible environments trigger "top-down" processing driven primarily by goal-directed activity and offer more potential to satisfy existing need states.
A key premise tested in the present study was how media best influenced the creation and extension of brand equity on a nonconscious level, separate from the ability to communicate brand attributes.
In short, the authors sought to discover how media exposure can change the nonconscious associations in the brain that are the building blocks of need states and motivate purchase.

TV Only
Did not view the brands online, only exposed to the brands during Glee or Family Guy television content

Online Only
Did not view the brands on TV, only exposed to the brands through general interest Web sites   Increasing the "bottom-up" relevance of such content is highly important, as prior research suggests, and the present study confirms, that a key difference between online and television advertising is that online advertising can be more easily ignored (Dreze and Hussherr, 2003). Further, this finding helps identify mechanisms to explain prior research demonstrating increased advertising effectiveness with cross-platform exposure (Nielsen, 2010;IAB, 2008).
The results, therefore, would seem to support a synergistic media-planning process of forging and maintaining brand equity with television while enhancing brand engagement by advertising in thematically related context online.
The authors believe that the study has a number of strengths: • This study also has a number of limitations: • It did not test the connection-creation process for the synergy condition in reverse (i.e., have brands appear online first and then gauge the subsequent impact to television exposure). The decision to exclude this condition was based on the early finding that television contributed an overwhelming share of brand engagement and brand resonance in isolated exposure, predicting that initial online exposure would have minimal added effect on television.
• Viewers in the television condition were not given the opportunity to change channels or fast forward. Although this is a limitation, the television experience did allow viewers to avert their gaze and emotionally "tune out"-behaviors that would be captured by the eye tracking and biometrics, respectively.
All research methods have limits, and this was deemed an acceptable tradeoff given that most television advertisements are experienced by large numbers of viewers and thus inevitably have some impact (Rubinson, 2009).
• The current study did not test advertising in online vehicles more comparable to television (e.g., online long-form or short-form video). Although rich-media display is still the most common form of advertising online, the expectation is that the audio and storytelling elements of dynamic online video renders it an environment that aligns more closely with immersion than flexibility and likely confers many of the same benefits as television. Future studies should test the role of online video in the next iteration of BIM validation.

CONCLUSIONS
The present study indicated that immer-