Customer Suitability, in the wild
Where Black Friday's biggest ads actually land
Black Friday is coming, and some of the UK's biggest advertisers are about to run their deal ads everywhere. So we ran an experiment. We took seven of last year's UK Black Friday ads and had our Digital Twins simulate the customer's response across a range of YouTube content, scored for resonance. The results were surprising. Read on.
In the most cluttered week of the year, brands need to know where their ads resonate, stay out of the content where they don't, and give themselves the best chance of cutting through.
Background you'll need
The engine: human-calibrated Digital Twins, synthetic replicas of consumers, 80.4% accurate against human responses. A panel of 60 is used for the UK audience in this report.
How we measure the fit: how well an ad lands with the person watching, in the content they're watching. The Digital Twins score it from 0 to 10 for every combination of ad and content. In this report, a score of 5 or more means the ad resonates. Under 5, it doesn't.
The nine reasons people watch content, from Reward and Treat to Stay Informed. The need state is the why behind every resonance score.
Why it matters
Why brands should care about driving resonance
Putting the right ad into the right content makes a difference. Independent research compares ads running in content that fits them with ads that don't:
That fit is what we call resonance, and it is what our Digital Twins score.
Sources. Recall: IAS + Tobii eye-tracking study ("Ad Context & Attention"). Favourability and receptivity: IAS, The Congruence Effect (+107% and +57%, rounded down to 2× and 1.5×).
The line-up
The seven Black Friday ads
Each one scored against the same 300 pieces of UK YouTube content, by the same 60 Digital Twins.
The simulations
A focus group for every impression.
Digital Twins of UK customers watched each ad in every piece of content it could run in, and scored its resonance out of 10.
Digital Twins
a representative UK panel
Black Friday ads
each scored on its own
YouTube content
Green: the ad resonates there. Red: it doesn't.
Each twin watched each ad in each piece of content and scored it out of 10, with the reason in their own words.
The result
For every ad, a third to half of the content doesn't resonate.
Half of what decides an ad is the ad. The other half is the content it runs in, and that half is not usually measured. So we scored the seven ads across the same UK YouTube content. An ad resonates in a piece of content when it scores 5 or more out of 10. The share of content where each ad resonates runs from 51% to 67%.
Simulated results. This is not an ad-quality ranking: it shows how much of this content suits each ad.
Is context the driver?
It's not the contextual category. Each has a massive range of resonance.
The obvious home for a deal ad is shopping-adjacent content. So we scored the lot: home content, fashion, gaming, property, food, sport and more. Every contextual category has a big low-to-high range of resonance inside it. The lowest and highest score in each, with the average marked:
Every contextual category with at least 5 pieces of content in our set. The dark tick marks the average.
No contextual category is the answer. Their averages sit between 3.5 and 6.4. The range inside them is much bigger: Healthy living alone runs from 1.0 to 8.7. Here is the same ad in two pieces of content from the same contextual category, at opposite ends of the scale:
Home & gardenUltimate Laundry Segment | Big Laundry Room Clean, DIY & Chat
Louise Pentland
“My laundry routine needs an upgrade, so I am grabbing my phone for this.”
Home & gardenDried honesty seed heads for sale - calm, relaxing, mindful, and breathe x
Common Farm Flowers
“This is a jarring break from the calm flowers. I would rather skip it.”
The driver
It's the need state the viewer is in.
Group the content by the reason someone pressed play (a treat, a decision, winding down) and everything snaps into focus. Every ad, every need state, scored out of 10, against the typical score for ads we have tested on this panel:
| Need state | What the viewer is doing | Currys | O2 | Wayfair | EE | Gymshark | ASOS | Ralph Lauren | UK norm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decision Support | actively weighing up a choice | 7 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 6 |
| Control and Confidence | organising the week, the money, the household | 8 | 7 | 9 | 6 | 7 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Reward and Treat | an earned indulgence | 5 | 7 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
| Identity and Expression | taste, style and values on display | 4 | 4 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 5 |
| Progress and Improvement | upgrading routines and habits | 5 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Escape and Entertainment | switching off into fun or immersion | 2 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 6 |
| Stay Informed | news and analysis; keeping up | 3 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Refresh and Reset | winding down; a mood reset | 2 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Connection and Belonging | with the people who matter; family, community | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 5 |
Scores are rounded to the nearest whole number. Green means the ad resonates in that need state (5 or more). Red means it doesn't (under 5). The UK norm is the typical score for ads we have tested on this panel. The ads run left to right from the one that leans most on deciding and organising to the one that leans most on treating and taste. Read the pattern down each column: small gaps between two ads are not meaningful.
What the Digital Twins had to say:
Each score is that twin's own rating of the ad in that content, out of 10. The need state is why they were watching.
Ad by ad
Most content is shared. Some pairs share far more than others.
Every pair of ads: of the content where either one resonates (5 or more), how much both resonate in. Colours are relative to the 21 pairs: the greener the cell, the less that pair overlaps compared with the others; the redder, the more the two are after the same content.
| Wayfair | Currys | O2 | EE | Ralph Lauren | ASOS | Gymshark | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wayfair | |||||||
| Currys | |||||||
| O2 | |||||||
| EE | |||||||
| Ralph Lauren | |||||||
| ASOS | |||||||
| Gymshark |
What to do about it
How brands can maximise their advantage
Black Friday is the most crowded time of the year to buy, and none of that crowding is spread evenly. The advantage goes to whoever knows which content is genuinely theirs.
Some content resonates for your ad and no one else's. That is where you face the least competition, so it should cost you less.
Sharing content does not mean sharing it evenly. Where a competitor resonates more than you in the same content, you pay a contested price for content that suits their ad better than yours.
Some content is wanted by several advertisers at once, and that is where prices go up. Knowing where your ad resonates most tells you the most you should pay there, and what share of that content to aim for.
Different creative resonates in different content. The more creative you run, the more content there is where your ad faces little competition, or resonates most.
Every impression gets checked for Brand Safety and Brand Suitability. Customer Suitability is the missing piece. We score it for every impression and optimise your buy in real time.
Find Out More