Rocket Mortgage was in the early stages of developing their advertising campaign for Super Bowl LV. They had created six unique ad concepts and wanted to know which concept had the broadest emotional appeal with consumers. Rather than using traditional ad testing strategies, Rocket Mortgage decided to partner with emotion analytics company, Dumbstruck and test the emotional effectiveness of the concepts in animatic form. Their goal was to use the emotional insights identified in the test results to help determine which ad concept would move into production and air during the game.

Using Dumbstruck’s emotion analytics technology and unique audience segmentation capabilities, Rocket Mortgage was able to measure how each creative concept performed with target demographics as well as customized psychographic and behavioral based audiences.

The data revealed key insights into audience response and creative effectiveness for each concept, as well as insights into three specific creative areas Rocket Mortgage wanted to examine: Celebrity Likeability, Brand Clarity, and Brand Safety.

Of all the concepts tested, the ‘Certain Is Better’ concept featuring Tracy Morgan demonstrated that it had the overall strongest emotional appeal across broad audiences. Rocket Mortgage leveraged the emotional insights identified in the results to help inform their decision to move forward with ‘Certain Is Better’ for Super Bowl LV.

As Dumbstruck’s test results indicated, the Tracy Morgan spot ‘Certain Is Better,’ was well received by audiences during Super Bowl LV. The ad went on to be voted the #1 Super Bowl commercial by USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, which has become an industry standard for measuring the success of Super Bowl ads. Rocket Mortgage’s second ad spot, ‘Certain Is Better’ featuring Tracy Morgan and Joey Bosa,” took the #2 spot in the ranking, which makes Rocket Mortgage the first brand to claim the top two spots in the competition since 2007.

Dumbstruck’s emotion analytics technology is rooted in over 50 years of research in neuroscience and psychology that demonstrates how emotion is the primary driver of human decisions and behavior.

How Dumbstruck's technology works:

Consumers opt-in to the video viewing process on a browser-based platform which accesses PC or mobile cameras.

Using proprietary AI-powered facial coding technology, Dumbstruck identifies facial micro-movements in real-time, moment-by-moment, as consumers watch a video ad. Dumbstruck’s advanced eye gaze technology simultaneously measures attention dispersion -- a key metric in calculating viewer attention, conscious thought, and information processing. Participants also take a short survey that helps us identify relevant consumer traits and incorporate them in our analysis.

Following the viewing process, Dumbstruck’s emotion analysis technology maps facial micro-movements to emotional data patterns and pairs this data with eye gaze movements. This allows us to identify insights into how participants feel about specific creative elements within each ad, helping us to understand which elements drive the strongest emotional resonance, and how to shape the creative to improve message cognition and brand perception.

The Narrative Structure lens is also applied in the analysis to measure the effectiveness of the ad’s story arc.