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Mixed Emotions: Emotional Juxtaposition in OnlineAdvertising
Alison Johnston, Clifford Nass
Communication between Humans and Interactive Media LabCommunication Department, Stanford UniversityStanford, CA 94305
ABSTRACT
 In The Emotion Commotion [3], Aaron Marcusdiscusses the importance of emotional factors on user interface and product design. While the effects of emotions on consumer behavior have been studied for decades, little is known on the effects of emotional  juxtaposition in advertising. In order to test this effect,we gave participants four news stories combined withbanner advertisements of matching and mismatching emotions. Our results found that while the emotional  juxtaposition of content and advertisements did not affect perception of the ads, it did affect perceptions of the content. In particular, sad advertisements significantly improve the reception of happy content and increased the likelihood that the participant would recommend it to a friend.
KEYWORDS
Emotions, Emotional Juxtaposition, Ads, Advertising,Online Advertising Placement
INTRODUCTION
For decades, advertisers have been concerned with ad placement. Beer advertisements adorned sportsstadiums while make-up and designer clothingadvertisements filled women’s magazines. With theadvent of the Internet, advertisers were suddenly ableto pair ads with keywords and content leading to morespecific targeting. Banner advertisements on aFacebook page have information regarding your age,gender, club affiliations, interests and romantic statusand can target the user accordingly. Similarly, ads onGoogle search are able to know what a person islooking for at that very moment.However, while advertisers look at the type of contentnext to the ad, little is done in terms of evaluating theemotion of the content and the effect that this mighthave on the actual advertisement and perception of the product.Additionally, very few content providers consider theeffects that ads have on their content—beyondsuggesting certain morals (e.g., the negativeconnotations of a cigarette or liquor advertisement)and visual irritation (e.g., flashing banner ads).To better understand the affects of emotions onconsumer behavior and interaction, one can look at theresearch discussed by Byron Reeves and Cliff Nass in
The Media Equation
[4]. After running a series of studies assessing the effects of emotions on theactions and memory of participants, the authors state,“Negativity not only causes people to remember whatever is happening at the moment it isexperienced. It also changes the way information is processed after the negative experience is over.”They also find that “painful and negative experiencesget attention…People reallocate thinking, storeinformation differently and experience feelings thatchange everything from how we feel to how our  bodies function.”This suggests that the emotions of ads and the contentsurrounding them would change the way that the adsand content are perceived as readers adjust their focusand trigger their memories in different manners toaccommodate for happy or sad feelings.As a result, one could hypothesize that sad contentwill improve the performance of an ad and a sad adwill improve the perceived quality of content, becausesubjects will pay more attention and remember more
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about the content or ad after the fact.However, past research has also shown that people aremore likely to remember mood-congruent informationthan mood-incongruent information. In a studyconducted in 1981, Bower, Gilligan and Monteir [1][2] put subjects in a happy or sad mood before readingstories about several characters. The following day,the subjects remembered more about the characterswhose moods were the same as the subjects’ thanabout the characters with opposing moods.This leads us to assume that while sad content and adswill positively affect impressions and recollections,the juxtaposition of similar emotions will alsoimprove recall, meaning that people will be mostlikely to remember the content and ads from thesad/sad combination, but will also be able to recallhappy/happy combinations nearly as well.
METHOD
 Design
To test this hypothesis, we designed a study that paired happy and sad content with happy and sad banner advertisements in matching and contrastingsituations.In order to maximize emotional reactions to thecontent, we pretested a series of recent news stories,taking care to select stories that couldn’t easily be pinned to a certain date. We selected the two storieswith the happiest and the saddest ratings based on the pretest. Our two happy stories covered the rising roleof women in politics and the current positive state of the country of Mauritius. Our sad stories coveredMexican drug killings and AIDS in Rwanda. Thesewould serve as HappyContent1 (HC1),HappyContent2 (HC2), SadContent1 (SC1), andSadContent2 (SC2) in our study.To portray the same products and services in both ahappy and sad light to prevent product bias, wecreated banner advertisements from scratch. After aseries of pretests, we were left with ads for a datingsite, a job site, a leukemia research organization and a brand of wine. Each had two versions of the ad withthe same image and fonts—one with text focusing onsomething happy and the other with text focusing onsomething sad. For example, the happy Leukemiaresearch ad boasted about a young boy who had beatleukemia, while the sad ad discussed the number of children who had died from leukemia. The banner adswere then embedded on the side of the story textexactly as in traditional news websites.These story/ad combinations were combined to createeight questionnaire variations, each with four differentstory/ad combinations: happy content/happy ad, sadcontent/sad ad, sad content/happy ad and happycontent/sad ad. We also ensured that eachquestionnaire had all four stories and all four productsand services advertised. Diagram 1 shows thestructure of the eight versions of the study. The four happy ads are represented by HA1, HA2, HA3 andHA4. The four sad ads are represented by SA1, SA2,SA3 and SA4. Of course, a given participant wouldnot receive both a happy ad and a sad on the sametopic.
Q1HC1/HA1SC1/SA2SC2/HA3HC2/SA4Q2HC1/SA1SC1/HA2SC2/SA3HC2/HA4Q3SC1/HA1HC1/SA2HC2/HA3SC2/HA4Q4SC1/SA1SC1/HA2HC2/SA3SC2/HA4Q5HC1/HA3SC1/SA4SC2/HA1HC2/SA2Q6HC1/SA3SC1/HA4SC2/SA1HC2/HA1Q7SC1/HA3HC1/SA4HC2/HA1SC2/SA2Q8SC1/SA3HC1/HA4HC2/SA1SC2/HA2
Figure 1. Experimental Design
 Participants
We enlisted 64 self-selected undergraduate andgraduate-level students from classes, assigning eight participants to each questionnaire.
 Procedure
We asked participants to take our study online at their own conveniences within a two-week time frame.When each participant began the study, he/she wasasked to close all other windows on the computer to prevent distractions. The participant was then shownone story/ad combination at a time, followed by a
 
series of questions pertaining to emotions and liking,first about the story and then the advertisement next toit.Two days after completing the initial questionnaire,each participant was emailed the link to a follow-upquestionnaire with questions testing memory of thestories and advertisements. They were asked to selectthe topics they had read about, the types of productsand services advertised, and the brand names of the products and services from a multiple choice list.
 Analysis
After gathering data from all 64 participants, wegrouped responses based on emotion combination, notactual stories or ads. For example, all happycontent/happy ad combinations were grouped with theother happy content/happy ad combinations,regardless of topic.A factor analysis of the questionnaire suggested asingle factor.
Good content 
was an index of enjoyable, interesting, educational, and interested inthe topic.
RESULTS
After running a multivariate linear regression on our data, we found two main domains that wereinfluenced by the emotional juxtaposition. First, therewere main effects for good content.Content GoodAd GoodFpFpContent49.48.0010.83.37Ad5.80.020.94.34Content*Ad1.97.170.94.34HH Mean24.5812.01HS Mean26.6712.85SH Mean21.8511.88SS Mean22.3411.88Table 1. Good ContentBoth the emotion of the content and the adsignificantly affected the perceived quality of thecontent. Happy content was perceived as better thansad content, but this could be an artifact of the actualstories. The more striking result is that participantsliked the content better when it was juxtaposed withsad ads rather than happy ads. There was nointeraction. The quality of the ad was not predicted byeither variable nor by the interaction.A second variable for which we found significantresults was a person’s likelihood to recommend thecontent to others.ContentRecommendAd RecommendFpFpContent13.21.0010.00.99Ad3.91.051.53.22Content*Ad3.95.050.18.68HH Mean3.492.63HS Mean5.942.43SH Mean4.972.73SS Mean4.942.32Table 2: Recommend the Content to OthersAs displayed in Table 2, the content is affected by theemotion of the content and the emotion of the ad, aswell as an interaction between the two.The two main effects are an artifact of the interaction.The key result is that happy content is much morelikely to be recommended to others when it is juxtaposed with a sad ad as compared to a happy ad,consistent with the previous result.There were no predictors for recommendations of theadvertisements.As seen by both variables, sad ads improved responseto the content, particularly in the case of happycontent. Table 3 below shows the significant effectscaused by happy and sad ads on happy content.
Variable 1Variable 2EffectFp
HHCgoodHSCgoodAd6.75.01HHCrecommendHSCrecommendAd8.06.01
Table 3.
 Happy Content Comparisons
Interestingly, we did not find any significant effects of emotional juxtaposition on the recall of news stories,ads and products two days later 
DISCUSSION
While we found that the emotional juxtapositioncreated by the advertisement affected the subjects’ perceptions of the news story, our hypothesis wasincorrect that the juxtaposition would affect participants’ impressions and recollection of theadvertisements as well.
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