Enabling Emotion-Driven Audience Insights for Movie Trailers

Dan Schönemann and Morten Thomsen conduct research on movie audiences in collaboration with a group run by Nordisk Film, The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, The Danish Film Institute, and Biografklub Danmark — four organizations that lead the way in innovating how people engage with films in Denmark.

Despite the volumes of data they collect, their quantitative and qualitative research is often inhibited by the fact that audiences have to articulate exactly how they feel about films, trailers, and other cinema products – in the form of focus groups and surveys, which can be plagued by issues like participant bias. They therefore wanted a way to supplement this data with an understanding of how audiences actually respond emotionally when they watch, instead of them having to remember and describe what they were feeling afterwards. As Dan Schönemann puts it, “we have such an emotional product, and we want to see how that affects people.”

The team worked with iMotions Enablement Services to set up and conduct a study that collected Galvanic Skin Response data in real-time while participants watched film trailers. Their first time using the technology, the study was a testing ground for seeing whether GSR data could be effectively correlated with self-reported data from audiences about how much they remembered from the trailers, and whether they wanted to see the movie.

Morten Thomsen was curious to see whether iMotions could handle the several data streams simultaneously, with which he was impressed. The project proved to be positive for the flexibility of data acquisition, and he found iMotions to be an easy-to-use platform.

After collecting and reporting on the data with the help of iMotions, the team presented the work publicly in Copenhagen to industry leaders. It generated a lot of interest and triggered additional projects at partner universities in the region using biosensing like facial coding to understand trailer and box office success. As Thomsen describes it, the project “was the spark that ignited that interest.”

Dan Schönemann also sees GSR and other real-time trackable emotion technologies as the future of consumer insight in this field. With these tools, audience research isn’t so dependent on data that is too much after the fact, but is embedded in the moment, fully during the experience of watching.

(music for this video provided by reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.)