Unruly brings emotional targeting to video advertisers across India

Video ad tech company Unruly today launches a new targeting capability which helps advertisers across India connect with consumers most likely to emotionally engage with a specific ad. 

Unruly Custom Audiences (UCA) uses data from the company’s content evaluation tool Unruly EQ – created using almost 2 million consumer data points – to target people most likely to engage emotionally with a specific video, leading to increases in earned media impressions, brand recall and purchase intent. 

Academic and industry studies have repeatedly proven the effects of emotional advertising on brand and business metrics, with a recent IPA study reporting that emotional campaigns deliver 10x higher profitability and market share gains than rational ones.

UCA can also help marketers target light buyers of a brand, consumers who have a preference for competitors’ brands and hard-to-reach, customised audiences such as business decision-makers and movie-goers. The company claims that campaigns using UCA have seen significant uplifts in campaign performance, up to +74 per cent in brand favorability and +80 per cent in purchase intent. 

Unruly’s Commercial Director, India, Vijay Kunduri, said, “We’re really excited to be launching this ground-breaking solution for advertisers across India. For the first time, advertisers across the region can apply psychographic, emotional and bespoke targeting to their digital video buys. In today’s frenetic media landscape, brands that want success on social media and memorability at the point of purchase need to create and distribute contagious content that makes a deep emotional connection with their audiences.” 

“Emotion matters in marketing – it creates values and sets preferences. Inspires action. Drives sales. With the launch of this unique targeting capability, Unruly advertisers now know how, why, where and with whom their ads are resonating. And they can use Unruly’s distribution platform to optimise their digital video distribution on a creative-by-creative basis to reach and engage the sub-segments of their audience most likely to respond positively to the content.” 

How does UCA work? 

Audiences are first defined and identified among a survey panel of 500 nationally representative respondents. Unruly then profiles each audience, identifying the top characteristics for targeting – such as gender, age, income, personality type and contextual interests. When Unruly distributes the campaign, targeting is applied according to the profile of each audience, through a mixture of 1st and 3rd party data segments. 

UCA can be applied to a range of Unruly’s consumer-friendly formats. These include its skippable pre-roll format Unruly In-Stream, Unruly In-Article, a viewable outstream format which only begins to play when the video is in-view, and its click-to-play Unruly In-Page format. 

UCA targeting can also be applied to programmatic campaigns through UnrulyX, the viewable video SSP. UCA is powered by data from Unruly’s first party data management platform. In addition to custom audience targeting, video player formats and functionality are also optimised to ensure the campaign maximises viewer engagement and earned media.