Britain loves a good tv drama - especially when Olivia Colman is involved. But this time, Olivia brings real drama with real consequences that we should all stop to think about. Together with Amnesty International, Olivia Colman and Adrian Lester highlight the impact of the current UK housing crisis with a powerful and emotive ad.

Founded all the way back in 1961, Amnesty International aims to ‘protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied’. Check out their website here.

Let’s take a look at their latest ad campaign:

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For me, the ad conveyed two key messages:

1. The UK housing crisis is equally as dramatic and devastating as the fictional drama we see on our screens - and we need to take notice
2. Perceptions of homelessness need to be challenged, such as the common misconception that those who suffer homelessness must have brought it on themselves

But what did viewers take from the ad? How did it make them feel? And did it drive action? Let’s use Element Human’s ad-testing technology to find out.

With Element Human’s testing suite you can take an ad creative and insert it into a social media environment to test how it performs in context. This means ad campaigns can be tested ‘in the wild’, offering the most accurate read of performance by collecting real human reaction data. Currently there are four different social feeds available: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and just last week we released YouTube Shorts.

For my test, I tasked 250 UK general public members aged 18-65 with scrolling through a custom social feed environment designed to look and behave like Instagram. Element Human’s system then tracked and recorded both biometric and survey data while respondents watched Before Our Eyes. I was then able to compare my results with both a control group and a deep set of benchmarks from thousands of tests across the industry. Biometric data includes:

1. Attention (via eye-tracking)
2. Emotion (via facial coding)
3. Memory (using an implicit association test)
4. Brand uplift (using a post-view survey with traditional brand metrics)

So what did I learn from testing on Element Human?

Let’s start with upper-funnel metrics. By watching the ad, Top of Mind Awareness shifted from 0% among our control group to 8% among those who were exposed to the ad (I saw a similar shift in awareness for an ad I recently analysed, check it out here). It’s unsurprising that Amnesty International is not Top of Mind for most. There are a lot of prominent British charities in the market that make it hard to break through and achieve Top of Mind Awareness, so seeing a positive shift in awareness is a great start and a true testament to a great piece of creative.

Next, I had a look at what messaging landed with our viewers using a Message Association Test. ‘Across the UK millions of families cannot access basic human rights due to economic and social inequality’ - that’s the statement that viewers were most likely to agree with after watching the ad (80%), with an uplift of 22% compared to the control group. But what was really interesting was what I found when comparing results by gender:

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As you can see, women were much more agreeable with the statements than men. It could be that female viewers felt a stronger emotional reaction when shown a single mother struggling with the loss of her baby. And in this instance it has created stronger associations between Amnesty International and the UK housing crisis.

I was also interested in seeing what traits viewers associate with Amnesty International as a result of watching Before Our Eyes. One way of measuring this is by using an Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test measures ‘implicit’ (or subconscious) associations with a brand by recording reaction speed when viewers are presented with a brand and a set of traits (you can read more about it here). I tested four attributes for Amnesty International: Creative, Dedicated, Inspiring and Trustworthy.

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Without seeing the ad, only one third of viewers associated Amnesty International with ‘Dedicated’. But among those who viewed the ad, this association shifted to 52% - an impressive uplift of 73%! Before our Eyes was an immersive story that managed to convey the feeling that Amnesty International is on the ground and effectively dealing with the problem that is the UK housing crisis. So to see an uplift in association between Amnesty International and ‘Dedicated’ really highlights that point.

But how engaged were viewers and what were they feeling? Let’s take a look at Element Human’s biometric data.

On average, the ad managed to hold viewers attention for an average of 13 seconds inside the Instagram social media feed, placing the ad in the top 19% on the Element Human Instagram benchmark (~50k data points).

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And interestingly we see attention dip and then shoot up again when the plot twist is revealed - and as we can see, not only was attention overall higher than our benchmark, Before Our Eyes also managed to buck the trend of slowly waning attention as time goes on. Before Our Eyes took viewers on a rollercoaster of emotions that kept them engaged throughout the 2 minute video.

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And how did they feel while viewing the ad? Well, it seems they mostly felt surprised (and a little bit of sadness too). Let’s look at the key emotive moments in Before Our Eyes which is made simple with Element Human’s facial coding technology.

Our first most shocking moment is when Olivia Colman is told that kids are often taken to hospital with housing related illnesses, they then leave and end up back in hospital again - but sometimes they don’t. This is the heartbreaking moment viewers realise that children are, in fact, dying because of the UK housing crisis.

Then, our lead character, whose child passed away earlier, speaks in court. She tells the judge that she knows people must think this situation is her fault somehow but that she has tried everything and none of it mattered. This surprised viewers as they are left with another painful realisation.

Our final shock moment is when Olivia Colman reveals “This isn’t drama, this is real life”. A truly powerful moment that left viewers surprised and with a lot to think about.

So we’ve seen an increase in Top of Mind Awareness, key messaging landed, implicit association with ‘dedicated’, attention captured and held - but what about further down the funnel? Has the ad impacted action? Let’s take a look.

We asked viewers how likely they are to make a donation after watching the ad and just under half (47%) said they are likely to. But interestingly, when comparing different age groups, it seems that the younger viewers were much more likely to say they will make a donation, as you can see in the chart below:

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But just by viewing the ad we can see a total uplift of 22% in likelihood of donating - with similar uplifts across both age groups. Clearly this piece of creative impacted those of all age groups.

But our older viewers are still overall less likely to donate, why is that? Well according to Statista, as people age they are more likely to donate to charity, with 67% of those aged 50-64 currently donating to at least one charity in England. So if someone is already donating to charity this might impact their decision to donate to another, which is what we might be seeing in our data. So is marketing toward older people still effective in this case?

I had a look at how likely our viewers are to recommend supporting Amnesty International to friends and family and the results were surprising:

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As you can see, those aged 45-65 are still overall less likely to recommend supporting Amnesty International than younger viewers. However, by viewing the Before Our Eyes ad, we saw an uplift of 839% in likelihood of recommending among those aged 45-65! This is really interesting. It seems as though the ad was more likely to impact older viewers in terms of recommending others support Amnesty International rather than donating themselves.

Furthermore, according to one study, negative stimuli is less likely to motivate older adults to donate compared to younger adults - but older adults are more likely to feel a positive emotional reaction when they do donate compared to younger adults.

So perhaps this ad had enough of an emotional impact to drive older viewers to encourage others to donate, rather than donating themselves to another charity. This highlights the importance of thinking about your target audience. In this case, we might not gain new support in the form of donations from older viewers, but they are likely to advocate due to the emotional swell they felt watching the ad.

Before Our Eyes is a great example of how content type can impact different audiences. Our female viewers resonated more with the messaging as they put themselves in the position of our lead female character who has lost her baby due to poor housing. When it comes to action, our younger viewers felt more compelled to do something, as well as encourage others to do so as well.

But most interestingly, we saw an impressive shift in our older viewers when it came to encouraging others to support Amnesty International. The lesson here: think about your target audience and the impact your content can have on them. Amnesty International gained a new group of older advocates and younger donators all from one powerful ad (and Element Human made it easier and faster than ever to gather these learnings).

What did you take away from watching the ad and reading this article? Let us know in the comments and if you’d like to donate click here.

Written by Georgina Ferreira, Data & Insights Executive at Element Human.

This analysis contained only a small portion of the creative & campaign metrics tracked by Element Human. Ready to test your creative and show off the performance of your advertising? Let’s chat.