Measuring Audience Responses towards the Musical Background in a Commercial

The selection of the audio track; the best timing to overlay the logo; the overall duration… all these issues affect the effectiveness of a commercial. Together with the media studies faculty of a Chinese University, we explored the impact of different decisions when creating on the engagement of potential consumers and on their willingness to buy the product. Since traditional methods, surveys or eye tracking, have severe limitations, we used data gathered from physiological sensor. In particular, we used our own Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors, which have been successfully used before in other scenarios like theatre going and education. Our results show that our GSR technology can play an important role for the advertisement community. In contrast with surveys, using GSR data relevant results can be obtained even for small number of participants and the audience-watching experience is more accurately visualized. This enables advertisers to, for example, be able to decide when the logo should appear.