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Unlocking Reach in Premium Content
Mike Levin – Product Management, NBCU
Emily Kwok – Senior Director, Ad Experience Measurement, NBCU
NBCU’s Mike Levin and Emily Kwok tested brand safety in premium video content from a viewer perspective in their research using NBCU’s proprietary AI tech for automating brand safety and suitability decision making. The study’s three objectives asked whether increasingly violent episodes influence viewers’ experiences, if they then assign blame to marketers for knowingly advertising in explicit or violent content, and if there are specific instances where adjacency affects viewer sentiment towards an ad. Measuring unconscious response to nine episodes across two seasons tagged with three levels of risk, facial coding and eye gaze technology, complemented by traditional surveys, captured the impact on a nationally representative sample of 1,800 respondents. Finding that violent episodes maintained stable levels of attention, the study also determined that traces of negative emotion were scarcer in the more violent episodes.
Key Takeaways
- From the mildest episodes to the most violent, viewer attention remained stable. Attention to high risk episodes measured in at 51.5%, with attention to low-risk episodes at 51.4%.
- Viewers don’t attribute blame to advertisers. “There’s more reward than risk,” according to Emily. Viewers tend to enjoy brands that are sponsoring the content they love, controversial or not—8 in 10 agree that they don’t distrust brands that advertise in graphic TV shows.
- Several rare cases where gratuitous violence immediately preceding an ad break did carry negative sentiment into the first seconds of the ad.
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