A recent Realeyes study found that featuring humans in video creative increased Creative Efficiency and lowered the cost of reaching engaged viewers. Yet, only 70% of the 50,000 video ads we studied featured humans. We also found Creative Efficiency increases more when you feature humans in every scene.

The benefit of featuring humans stayed consistent across industries as well. The industries that were the most cost-effective to reach quality exposures were telecom, internet services and ISP; style & fashion, home & garden, and beverages. All were in the top six highest percentage of human presence featured in ads.

Conversely, it cost the most to reach quality audiences (highest qCPM) in the retail shopping, technology and computing, sports, and automotive industries. Of those, sports and retail shopping featured the least amount of scenes with humans present among all industries.

And finally, we found some industries over-indexed on using males or females, likely due to tradition or reinforced gender roles. But our study found in some industries, the least commonly used gender outperformed the more commonly used gender in Creative Efficiency.

What You Need to Know

·         Ads that feature humans drive down the cost of quality exposures in campaigns by 9%, yet nearly one-third don’t feature humans

·         When humans were present throughout the ad, Creative Efficiency increased 10%

·         Many industries with the highest cost of quality exposures used humans the least

 What You Need to Do

·         Use Human Actors: Our data prove that human presence increased Creative Efficiency on average. If you’re not using humans in your ads, you are wasting media investment and messaging opportunities

·         Include Humans in as Many Scenes as Possible: Creative Efficiency rises as an ad retains attention.  Integrating human presence throughout an ad’s duration can hold attention and prolong attentiveness

·         Avoid Cliche Gender Roles: Zig where your competitors zag by breaking gender stereotypes that have a negative impact on Creative Efficiency

Learn more by reading our full study here.

Alex Browne Director of Strategic Partnerships at Realeyes will be speaking at ATTENTION@MAD//Fest on Day 2, 6th July.