The BBC One Christmas ad premiered on Saturday, December 2nd straight after Strictly (smart move BBC!), stealing the viewers’ hearts with the girl’s first dance move. The Twittersphere went all emotional with many claiming the ad had left them in tears.
Emotional engagement is key to video content performance, and this film is brimming with emotion. Scoring an EmotionAll® Score of 9/10, the happy tears didn’t lie. We tested the film with 300 viewers. Women especially enjoyed the film scoring 10/10 which placed it in joint first place with that group. Also heart-warming is to see that its tender charms were not lost on men, scoring 9/10. We also saw a slightly better performance amongst middle and older age groups than with younger viewers.
The notable ‘hockey stick’ spike in happiness illustrates that father and daughter relationship is something that audiences relate to.
The film was conceived in-house by BBC Creative, directed by Elliot Dear and produced by Blinkink who employed traditional stop-motion technique to animate the characters, a method that adds a human quality. They also used CGI to map realistic facial expressions to the characters that added an emotional richness. Thank you BBC for making this Christmas a little bit warmer.
Every year Realeyes, facial coding and emotion recognition platform, tests key Christmas UK ads. This year, the ranking was published on November 28th. If this video had been released during the study it would have taken the third position in our ranking among 55 other UK Christmas ads, along with being 93% better than thousands of ads in our database.
