When it comes to advertising, innovation often means engagement from users. Keep up with the latest advancements can mean better brand recognition, and therefore a better ROI. Even ‘gimicky’ ad ideas can help businesses find success. So, the new advertisements that are being developed that allow the viewer to actually feel something when interacting might be surprisingly effective.
These ads are for mobile devices and use the haptic feedback features that many smartphones offer. The obvious example is a mobile ad for a car company. As the video shows the car being started up, the video plays the sound and the phone actually vibrates to give the feeling of the engine roaring to life.
According to early testing, these ads actually seem to be working well. Having the sense of touch incorporated into an ad resulted in a 62% increase in ‘feeling connected’ to the brand, according to a study from IPG Media Lab.
The research found that haptic technology led to a stronger emotional response. A standard mobile video advert achieved excitement levels of 30% and happiness levels of 37%, whilst TouchSense Ads by Immersion saw excitement jump to 38% and happiness rose to 44%.
Dmitry Lipkin, Senior Director, global marketing at Immersion, explains that the touch-emotion connection is innate to people and how they perceive the world.
“Using touch in ads shows advertisers how they can leverage this part of the human sensory experience. By partnering with IPG Media Lab for this media trial, we’re able to demonstrate the advertising value of haptic technology across a variety of sectors, and how brands can leverage this technology to create deeper, more meaningful consumer experiences.”
At this point these types of ads are only going to work on Android devices, however. iOS has far more restrictions on how different features of their phones can be accessed. Ads currently won’t have the ability to trigger the vibrate feature. If these ads become popular, however, Apple may make some adjustments to allow this type of ad to be created for their devices as well.
