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« On TV And Video » is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Fritz Brumder, CEO at Brandlive.

In 1981, Schlitz Beer conducted the first live taste tests during Super Bowl XV. Thirty-eight years later, this old-fashioned approach to television marketing is making a comeback with Snickers’ live Super Bowl ad, which will be preceded by a 36-hour live stream that began Thursday.

At a time when it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and keep audience eyeballs, brands have limited avenues to maintain viewer attention, even during the biggest television event of the year.

While splashy, Snickers isn’t just using live content to boost its buzz around the Super Bowl. This campaign will also yield tons of insightful data and give the brand the chance to experiment with creative before debuting its live ad during the game.

As networks have already been doing, I believe Snickers is using this campaign as a testing ground for future decision-making.

Here’s why.

Quantifying What Resonates Through Real-Time Testing

Going live creates a real-time feedback loop. While the audience likely sees the Snickers live broadcast as a preview, the brand can get a real sense of what resonates.

The brand can use the 36 hours of streaming content to gauge reactions to certain aspects – celebrities, animals, storylines, creative direction – and then tailor the actual live ad script to reflect those reactions. What gags, lines, camera angles and props elicited emotional reactions? That can be measured by the rate of response, type of response and so forth.

When you’re making that big of a bet live, in front of 100 million-plus people, it’s smart to hedge. The live broadcasts provide real-time data and the learnings can lead to intelligence that informs programming for the big game and beyond.

Here, Snickers is playing a modern media network, despite being a brand. That sort of shift in thinking could resonate further around the industry as other brands use live content to further test creative before taking it to market.

For this ad in particular, success will be measured not just by the audience reaction, but by how easy or difficult it is to implement audience feedback successfully on such a short timeline. In the immediate aftermath, only Snickers will really know how well it accomplished this.

Betting On Suspense

It’s the mystery of live – the off-chance that something could go off-script – that makes it titillating to audiences. Even if the premise does leak, live can always go askew so the element of surprise remains. And like any live content, the ability to be surprised or taken aback by the unexpected provides value that no other ad during this Super Bowl – or any other event – can match.

You can’t scoop the unexpected surprises that may emerge from live content, which is of utmost importance to brands in 2017. There is no leak potential. No chance for the brand’s message to end up in anyone else’s hands before its own. The first time media, consumers and the competition see a brand’s spot is the same time it does.

Still, despite all of those safeguards, live is still a bold move during the Super Bowl. At $5 million a pop, these ads aren’t cheap. But by going live, Snickers is able to do something no other brand can during the game: hold audience attention. That audience also includes every other advertiser in the world.

Will It Work?

It’s critical that Snickers uses the pre-game stream to the best of its abilities. This ad will become the model by which all others are judged as live becomes a larger part of brands’ future Super Bowl strategies. But perhaps the bigger legacy will revolve around the data a live experiment provides for brands.

Making people want to watch and talk about Super Bowl ads has always been the NFL’s goal. The same is true for advertisers. GoDaddy, Budweiser, Reebok, Volkswagen and other brands have impressed themselves upon audiences with a unique take on the Super Bowl ad concept. None of them truly reinvented the wheel. They just thought differently about how to reach audiences.

That’s what Snickers is doing here. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. But Snickers is still creating the road map for how advertisers will try harder during the Super Bowl moving forward. Whether it’s by way of live ads, more creative teasers or using pre-Super Bowl data more effectively, Snickers is certainly revealing a new way forward for advertisers’ biggest stage.

Follow Brandlive (@yourbrandlive) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

BRANDON, Fla., Feb. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Talk Fusion has just released an upgrade for its Live Meetings mobile app that allows users to host broadcasts and videoconferences directly from their Apple or Android devices.

Individuals with a Talk Fusion account can use the newly enhanced app to schedule and manage live events, invite guests to join, and start a meeting on their phone or tablet?features previously exclusive to the web application. While hosting a meeting, one can also share slides, stream video, interact in the live chat, manage their guest list, activate multiple webcams, and even pass presenter controls to a guest.

« We are very proud of this upgrade and we know our Customers and Independent Associates around the world are thrilled to experience it for themselves, » said Talk Fusion Founder CEO Bob Reina. « The new presenter features give people the freedom to go about their day, build relationships, and manage and grow their businesses without ever missing a moment. »

When the two-time award-winning video communication company took Live Meetings to the app stores in August 2016, it allowed the public to join real-time, high-quality broadcasts from any location; all they needed was a meeting invitation link. Talk Fusion has now taken the application a step further by adding this new presenter interface, bringing the convenience and flexibility of on-the-go broadcasting not only to attendees, but to meeting hosts as well.

« All of our products, including Live Meetings, benefit the two main industries where Talk Fusion thrives: video marketing and network marketing, » said Talk Fusion VP of Training Development Allison Roberts. « Our Customers can now host cost-effective business meetings from their phones and tablets; and our Associates can build international networks from any location, one mobile presentation and training session at a time. »

Live Meetings is one of five products packaged collectively in Talk Fusion’s all-in-one Video Marketing Solution, and the newest of its three mobile applications, including the Video Chat messaging app and Fusion On the Go, which allows users to create and send Video Emails from their phone or tablet.

A Talk Fusion ID is required in order to schedule and host a broadcast through the Live Meetings mobile app. However, any Apple or Android owner can use the app to attend events to which they have been invited?no account registration required.

More details about Talk Fusion’s products and upcoming developments are available at TalkFusion.com.

ABOUT TALK FUSION

Home of the world’s first all-in-one Video Marketing Solution, Talk Fusion is dedicated to helping businesses stand out from the competition, increase sales and profits, and keep their customers coming back. Talk Fusion offers dynamic ways to make marketing more engaging, memorable, and persuasive with video.

Talk Fusion’s innovative products are marketed person-to-person by Independent Associates in more than 140 countries. 30 day Free Trials of the all-in-one Video Marketing Solution are available to anyone who wishes to try before they buy?no credit card required?at www.TalkFusion.com.

Established in 2007 by Founder CEO Bob Reina, Talk Fusion fosters a strong commitment to Giving Back to family, friends, communities, and animal charities across the world. Learn more at www.TalkFusion.com and « Like » Talk Fusion at www.facebook.com/TalkFusion.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/talk-fusion-app-upgrade-allows-users-to-host-live-meetings-on-mobile-300402030.html

SOURCE Talk Fusion

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When it comes to marketing, most brands are sneakier than you think. To be successful, a modern company can’t just create a product that appeals to your pain points and offers a solution.

Related: Connecting With Customers: How to Market to Their Emotions

Instead, your favorite businesses create a connection with you on a deeper level. This is why you can sum up the advertisements and marketing schemes that prompt people to share and buy with a single word: emotional.

« But, surely we make decisions based on rational thought! » you’ll protest. Um, no.

While many people think rational thought wins out, studies show that people rely more on emotion than information to make purchasing decisions. Human beings are emotional by nature, which means that many of our decisions — from what we eat, to what we buy — are influenced by how we feel on any given day.

After all, if you think about it logically, your favorite pair of shoes is probably the same in structure as thousands of other pairs, but you rationalize that that favorite pair is better in some way.

The reason is that we’re all emotionally compromised. The marketing efforts that companies make form a deeper connection with us, and force us to fall in love with whatever they’re selling. In fact, the most-shared ads of 2015 were those which used emotional content.

If you’re a marketer, this focus on emotion should be particularly important to you. After all, while it’s important to educate your customers about your services and products, it’s even more important to make them feel something.

So, if you’re ready to get touchy-feely with your advertising efforts, it’s time to start looking at the world of human decision-making and how you can use it in marketing.

Peering into the emotional brain

According to Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California,  we need emotion to make basically any kind of choice. Through emotions, we connect brands and products experiences with our personal feelings and memories.

For example, if the first time you ate a burger from a local fast-food restaurant, you ended up being sick for several hours, you’re probably going to associate that restaurant with disgust. It doesn’t matter that you might have just had a one-off bad burger; your experience is still going to influence you in the long run.

Related: Why TD Bank’s Emotional ‘Thank You’ Video Is Marketing Magic

In the same vein, if you associate going to that local fast food restaurant with fun moments bonding with your family, then the chances are that you’ll go back time and time again — regardless of whether you really like the food or not. That’s because our emotions create preferences which influence decision.

Damasio made his conclusions by studying people who had suffered damage to the emotional and rational parts of their brain. These people had no connection between those segments, and while they could process information, they weren’t able to make decisions. Why? Because they didn’t know how they felt about the options they had.

Delving a little further into the scientific part of marketing, Psychology Today has outlined some core areas where emotions interact to facilitate human choice. For instance:

• Positive emotions, such as happiness, delight or satisfaction are more likely to build customer loyalty than anything else. Simply put: If you can make your customer happy, that matters more than all the great guarantees and refund policies in the world.

• Popularity is crucial. Finding ways to make yourself more likable isn’t a practice that stops after high school. In marketing, likability plays a huge part in brand perception, and whether an advertisement makes a positive impact.

• Emotional advertising can have a much larger impact on a customer’s choice to purchase a product than the content within that ad. In other words, it’s the emotions you convey — not necessarily the product features — that sell your item.

• Neuro-imagery shows that customers use their emotional brain rather than their logical brain to evaluate brands.

Think about the last time you really enjoyed an advertisement. The chances are, you didn’t like it because you just thought the information was intriguing; you liked it because it was funny, touching, smart or interesting. We like advertisements for all the same reasons we like people.

So, which emotions really count?

There are plenty of core emotions. So, should you be appealing to all of them? Well, probably not . . .

According to the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, the emotions that we use to make purchasing decisions use social constructs and interactions. They include:

• Happiness

• Sadness

• Surprise/Fear

• Anger/Disgust

While you probably assumed that « happiness » would be an emotion that all marketers should appeal to, the other options might surprise you. However, it’s important to remember that negative feelings can be just as strong as positive feelings when it comes to provoking a reaction.

Making the customer happy

Happiness is simple and easy and a wonderful thing for many brands to embrace. After all, what company doesn’t want to inspire a host of smiling, happy customers? Studies indicate that emotional articles and advertising that generate positive emotions are typically shared more often than articles that provoke negative emotions.

In fact, in 2015, the most shared ad of all time was « Friends Furever » by Android, which showed cute and inspiration friendships between animals.

Inspiring sadness

Sadness creates a very unique type of advertisement. There’s no point in a marketing scheme that makes your customer feel miserable and then suggests buying your product for no connected reason. Instead, you need to use sadness, then follow up with a product or service that can help to alleviate that feeling.

Studies have found that we are far more likely to empathize with sadness than any other emotion. That empathy can then be used to make us more generous and trusting. Sadness is best used when brands want their customers to emotionally connect and immediately develop that sense of trust and dependance.

Just take a look at this promotional video by MetLife Hong Kong showcasing the everyday struggles of a father.

Using fear and surprise

In all aspects of life, fear is a strong motivator. You push yourself to get out of bed and go to work because you’re afraid of not having enough money to pay the bills. You make sure that you drive under the speed limit because you’re afraid of hurting others, or getting a ticket. Scaring someone into action is hugely effective.

You’ll often find fear and surprise-based advertising in public service announcements for everything from drunk driving to smoking, to global warming. This is because fear promotes change and tells us that we need to take action to protect ourselves and the people we care about.

Turning to anger and disgust

Anger is generally seen as a negative emotion. In marketing, most people want to avoid anger wherever possible, as the last thing you want is annoyed customers. However, anger is also a powerful motivator; it spurs us to do something about the way we feel.

Disgust and anger can force us to think about our perspectives or situations, and ask important questions, or speak up against injustice.

For example, an Emmy-award winning advertisement campaign « #Like a Girl » was created by Always to grab your attention by repeating a famous insult. The idea of the ad is to make you feel frustrated about a social stigma, and force you to become part of the change.

How you can speak to customer emotions

In almost every aspect of marketing, there’s a space available where you can insert some emotion or feeling into the mix. From the pictures of happy, smiling people on your website testimonial page, to compelling videos that prompt your viewers to ask questions, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you to create emotional connections.

Some of the most effective emotional marketing solutions include:

• Video: An inspiring video can help viewers connect with characters on a screen and share their experiences.

• Emotional copywriting: Whether it’s the words on your landing page that pack an emotional punch, or the blogs that you write concerning important issues in your industry, words that really appeal to human emotion are sure to create a reaction.

• Storytelling: Human beings are naturally designed to love stories. Ever since your mother or father told you tales at bedtime when you were a child, you’ve learned to appreciate the simplicity and emotion of a story arc. In the same way, stories can shape the way we see the world through marketing, giving us an emotional investment in certain brands or companies.

• Social proof: Finally, the opinions of our peers are always going to have an impact. From those moments at school where you absolutely had to have a new jacket because all of your friends had it, to deciding where to go for lunch based on five-star reviews: We use other people’s opinions to form our own when we don’t have any prior experience regarding a product or service.

Related: Effective Marketing Appeals to Emotions Instead of Reason

Conclusion: that emotional touch

Educating your customer is crucial, but it isn’t enough if you want to make a lasting impression. Promoting an emotional response will help to create a long-standing relationship with any brand. After all, marketing strategies that don’t make us feel anything are boring and forgettable — two things that you never want your brand to be.

Related:
6 Challenges Faced By Every Blogger For Creating Conversion – Oriented Content
4 Ways to Get Noticed at a Crowded Trade Show
3 estrategias para conquistar a tus clientes en el Super Bowl (y siempre)

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This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com