Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements

TL;DR

This study investigates how visual context and attention influence emotional responses in video ads, revealing that attended objects and scene structure are more impactful than narrative or linguistic cues.

Contribution

It introduces a decomposition approach analyzing visual features and attention in ads, highlighting the primary role of attended objects and scene structure in affect prediction.

Findings

Attended objects significantly influence affective responses.

Scene structure outperforms individual objects in encoding affect.

Narrative cues are less predictive of ad affect.

Abstract

Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions. Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure the importance of each of these information channels by systematically incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.