Emotional connection to a show drives four times the purchase intent from ads, Disney research finds

Viewers who feel an emotional connection to a programme show four times the purchase intent from the ads around it as viewers who do not, according to new research from Disney Advertising. Emotionally connected viewers also had two and a half times higher ad recall, as Marketing Week reported. The study, run with the media research firm Eye Square, tracked 1,104 users of ad-supported platforms through natural ad exposure, eye tracking and facial emotion tracking.

Fans, repeat viewers and Disney+

People who describe themselves as fans of what they are watching were 1.9 times as likely to show purchase intent as the average streaming viewer. Audiences who return to the same show regularly did even better, with 4.7 times greater ad recall and five times greater purchase intent.

The research compared Disney+ with Netflix, Prime Video, ITVX and YouTube, and found ad recall and purchase intent were highest on Disney+. It says 58% of Disney+ viewers call themselves fans of the content, against a competitor average of 45%, and 79% report an emotional connection with what they watched, against 66%. Deborah Armstrong, senior vice president of Disney Advertising EMEA and country manager for the UK and Ireland, called this “the Disney difference”.

Brands inside the story

Disney executives also made the case for advertisers becoming part of the shows themselves. Armstrong pointed to Rivals, where a Waitrose store features in the series and the retailer brought back its staff uniform from the 1980s, and where the character Maude drives a Volkswagen GTI. Dan Fanshawe, senior client director at Kantar, told the same briefing that this kind of cultural integration is “a huge playground for brands”, as long as they stay true to what they stand for.

Why it matters

This is a media owner’s own research, and it puts its own platform on top, so buyers should treat the platform comparison with some caution. The wider finding is more useful: the attention and feeling people bring to a show appear to carry over to the ads around it. That supports planning by programme and by depth of fandom, not just by the cheapest impression.

It also lands as UK budgets keep moving into streaming, with addressable TV among the fastest growing channels in the latest AA/WARC figures. Streamers are competing hard for that money, from Disney’s pitch on fandom to Netflix, whose ad revenue forecast has been cut to $2.7bn. For UK brands, the practical test is whether a partnership like Waitrose’s in Rivals can be measured as rigorously as a standard spot, and fewer than half of brands have a defined effectiveness function to do that.