Casey Kudrenko, Senior Analyst, Neuro-Insight
Samsung’s Gold Lion award winning (TV/Cinema Film: Consumer Goods); “The Spider and the Window” commercial, sees a little terrarium spider who falls in love with the new Galaxy S22 Ultra when she sees an advertising motif for the phone on the opposite wall. From masterminds at Leo Burnett (Frankfurt, Germany), produced by Zauberberg Productions GMBH (Berlin, Germany), the goal was to highlight it’s new camera innovation, to ensure a strong positioning in the highly competitive smartphone market.
Faced with the tall task of combating a pure feature communication (previously perceived as “boring” by their target audiences), Leo Burnett set to develop an emotional storytelling that would not be forgotten – including their new flagship Galaxy S22 Ultra phone. As part of our exclusive Neuroscience of Cannes series, now in it’s eight year, we analysed the brain activity of typical viewers to understand the impact of this little spider’s love story and the effectiveness of Samsung’s message.
How we did it
Neuro-Insight measured brain activity to see how more than 100 typical viewers respond to the ad. The specific technology used by Neuro-Insight is founded in work originally developed for academic and neuroscience research, and has been used to analyse the effectiveness of Cannes award winners for over eight years. The technology allows us to simultaneously record viewer’s second-by-second changes in; approach (like)/withdraw (dislike), emotional intensity, engagement and memory whilst watching advertisements and/or consuming media. The measure Neuro-Insight predominantly focuses on is Long-term Memory Encoding, based on it’s strong and highly researched link to consumer behaviour. This measure reveals, second by second, what the brain is storing (or encoding) into conscious and subconscious long-term memory. Neuro-Insight’s Memory Encoding graph reveals how elements of the ad are stored; the higher the graph, the more strongly that moment in the ad is stored in memory and the more likely it will influence consumer behaviour.
Time Series: Assessing The Second-by-Second Impact
Below is the times series video for the viewers’ response to Samsung’s The Spider and the Window. The red trace reflects memory encoding from the left hemisphere, which is primarily responsible for the encoding of the detail in experiences, such as text, dialogue or micro features. In contrast, the right hemisphere which is reflected by the blue line is concerned with the storing of global features, such as soundtracks, scenery, facial expressions as well as the emotional underpinnings of a particular experience.
On quick overview we see typical ebbs and flows across the opening 35 seconds of the creative, where viewers process the spider as the protagonist, it’s context, it’s love interest and the beginning of the longing predicament, all accompanied by Nazareth’s power ballad classic “Love Hurts”. The second-by-second responses, in particular the detailed memory encoding peaks (red trace) corresponding with the tight-shots of our expressive eight-legged friend. These peaks in memory encoding certainly provides credence to the creative also collecting a Gold lion for the film craft category of animation, as well as a silver lion for visual effects.
Successful Samsung Product Integration
Whilst we may be entertained by our spider-sized love story, how effective is the creative in serving Samsung/ Leo Burnett’s goal? Figure 1 above sees the key scene analysis of critical moments of the Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra integration amongst the narrative, noteworthy is the first highlighted detailed memory peak (red trace >.70, signifying highly effective encoding) of the phone. The phone, with it’s camera lenses reminiscent of spider eyes, is not simply integrated as an in-situ phone, but as a secondary main character and love interest in the love story. This initiates a powerful integration that likely colours the remaining narrative and insures Samsung’s attribution to the implicit magic within the remaining storytelling. The other highlighted peaks in figure 1 exhibit the multiple successful points of product integration secured by Samsung continually consolidating the product feature amongst the narrative from start to finish.
The Emotional Journey
Figure 2 above displays the emotional intensity experienced by viewers throughout the storytelling. The impactful emotional peaks, align right on cue with the key story pillars; falling in love, heartbreak upon the love interest/phone removal, followed by the ultimate reuniting. Whilst developing emotion around star talent or characters is a feat within itself, it is quite the achievement to execute moments of key product integration amongst these emotional crescendos.
All Good Things Come to an End
Following the emotional roller coaster, viewers ultimately witness a touching happy end between the spider and phone. The time series graph in figure 3 exhibits just how this ‘happy end’ is processed by the brain, as we see the steady attenuation of memory encoding through the final “Love knows no boundaries” tagline, and Samsung master branding frame. These lower levels of memory encoding following the final peak (reuniting of spider and phone) depict a phenomenon of brain activity, first identified by Neuro-Insight as; Conceptual Closure.
Conceptual Closure occurs when the brain perceives a narrative sequence to have come to an end, technically, this end is termed an ‘event boundary’. On encountering an event boundary, there is a momentary drop in long-term memory encoding as the brain takes a “time out” to process or consolidate the information it has just received. During this time it is relatively unreceptive to new information (e.g Samsung’s tagline and master frame) and all responses tend to fall away sharply. Often small subconscious cues ensue this phenomenon, and can remain otherwise unarticulated or undetected within traditional explicit research (e.g surveys, focus groups etc). The small subconscious cues in this creative are likely that the narrative is resolved and viewers ‘get’ that the spider has met it’s happy ending. Additional the final beats of the soundtrack also subconsciously hint to ‘the end’. Typically early testing and insights can seek to optimise the tagline and master branding frame which fall in more moderate regions of memory encoding, however the highly effective Galaxy S22 Ultra integration throughout the narrative has likely secured Samsung’s success.
Outcome: The brain (and the people) love it.
With multiple strong peaks achieved in both Memory Encoding and Emotional Intensity at critical branding moments within the narrative it is no surprise that the campaign boasted over 21M video views across all social platforms and more than 35M impressions, as well as achieving Top #3 of YouTube trends in less than a week. The still live campaign that was launched in February 2022 with placement across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, microsites and numerous banners, video ads and advertorials eventuated in target audience engagement as being noted as “tremendous” and as “extraordinarily positive”.
Aligning with the predictive nature of the memory encoding within Neuro-Insight’s data, the most important outcome of the positive effect of the campaign resulted in significant increase of pre-orders of the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Interestingly the Cannes award winners noted that even users of competitor devices declared their love for the video and the spider, an additional boost of brand attachment that could be recognized clearly. Neuro-Insight’s analysis has enabled the comprehensive evaluation and potential for optimisation of the Cannes Gold Lion winning, unbiasedly and subconsciously assessing the moments Samsung/Leo Burnett achieved their goal to develop an emotional storytelling that would not be forgotten.
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