Context

Nike surprises us with one of the ads of the year thanks to “You Can’t Stop Us”, a double-sided advertising campaign with impeccable technical performance.

Nike’s 90-second split-screen creative called ‘You Can’t Stop Us’ has been winning big on social media platforms since its launch in July 2020. With close to 60 million views on YouTube alone, the commercial from the multinational apparel brand displays the themes of social justice, diversity, and collectivism.

You Can’t Stop Us | Nike – “Because as athletes, we are never alone. Sport unites us. Strengthens us. Keeps us pushing ahead. No matter what, we will always come back stronger, together. You can’t stop sport. Because you can’t stop us.”

The action-packed, blink-and-you-miss advertisement features 53 Nike-sponsored athletes including names like LeBron James, Naomi Osaka, Serena and Venus Williams, Rafael Nadal, with world cup-winning US footballer Megan Rapinoe as the narrator. Entropik Tech deployed its proprietary Emotion AI platform – Affect Lab – to unearth the unstated response and reactions from viewers as they watched the advertisement.

Heat Map generated using Emotion AI

Affect Lab uses facial coding to detect and analyse facial expressions against the emotion metrics of happy, sad, surprise, anger, neutral and detached. Meanwhile, eye tracking interprets the viewer’s eye movements and establishes first view duration, view time distribution, gaze trail, and heat maps.

Interestingly, according to the emotion insights, the intensity of negative emotions was higher than the positive emotions among the viewers. The globally applauded ad by Wieden + Kennedy earned an attention level of 64.64 on an average and was pretty consistent throughout the 90-second ad.Besides, Affect Lab’s emotion report indicates that the viewer’s sadness quotient was peaking whenever they saw a Paralympic athlete on the screen.

In a Nutshell

Entropik’s emotion recognition insights suggest that there is a drastic shift among the content advertised by leading brands and advertising agencies in the pandemic-stricken world. The emphasis is more on social responsibility, climate change, and the collective spirit required to flatten the curve of Coronavirus. Similarly, creatives on an average are evoking more negative emotions than positive, as viewers are upset watching the impact of COVID-19 across the world.In such a difficult phase, before releasing a commercial or any visual Ad concept, companies can utilise Emotion AI-powered insights to identify, interpret, and decode the audience’s responses in real-time.Don’t miss out on reading your consumers’ emotions!

Emotion Report MetricsAffect Lab emotion metrics includes attention that highlights the visual appeal standpoint of any creative on a scale of 0-100The emotions are also defined in broader segments like positive emotions (happy and surprise) or the intensity of the negative emotions (sad and anger) on a scale of 0-100