A New Tool Measures Children’s Emotional Response to Ads

Summary

Measuring emotions in children exposed to advertisements just got easier. A pictorial instrument developed by a French marketing professor and an illustrator can assess basic emotions, is particularly well-suited for 8- to 11-year-olds, and can be used by both practitioners and academics around the world without the need for translation.

The authors described the tool as consisting of “a set of pictograms (e.g. cartoon puppets), each representing facial and bodily expressions associated with a so-called basic emotion (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), that appear together with a 4-point response format indicating intensity.“

Among the practical takeaways:

• “Emotions are key drivers of advertising effectiveness, especially among children, so advertisers need to measure the emotions that children experience on their exposure to advertising.
• Conducting marketing and advertising research on children using traditional measures of emotions (e.g. fMRI, EMG, GSR) is neither practical nor cost-effective, and such research often lacks validity and reliability.
• The instrument is “reliable, and valid, and it can support cross-cultural studies without requiring translation efforts.”
• It is fun for children to use, which contributes to its effectiveness.
• The scale “also could be used to assess which emotions result in the most effective outcomes in response to different public-policy messages, such as to discourage smoking or to trigger preferences for sustainable products.”