Volvo and Sky Atlantic’s Heart-Stopping Moments

How biometric data is helping Sky Media & Volvo evaluate and maximise the effectiveness of their Human Stories sponsorship campaigns

After 5 successful years of the Sky Atlantic-Volvo partnership, we wanted to show that emotions create an even deeper connection with Volvo customers within our sponsorship. We created two emotive films that gave voice to Volvo’s commitment to environmental change, embedding the brand in the cultural zeitgeist and giving us the opportunity to work with research company ‘Future Thinking’ to understand the effect of comms on deeper emotional triggers and biometric reactions. From this, we saw a +8% pts increase YoY in purchase intent that helped support a record year in sales for Volvo.

Volvo’s challenge to Sky Media in 2018 was to continue to target the premium and affluent audiences of Sky Atlantic using the power of sponsorship. However, after 5 successful years of brand building, we needed a heart-stopping idea that really put Volvo in the hearts and minds of today’s consumer.

Research in Cognitive Psychology shows us that messages with emotive and rich semantic content embed themselves deeper in memory. So, elevating Volvo’s environmental themes in sponsorship could help us carry the collective zeitgeist of their target audience into stronger purchase intent for the product, taking our partnership into exciting, yet unchartered, territory.

Our solution was to create exciting and emotive films to raise awareness of plastic pollution reflecting both Volvo and Sky Ocean Rescue’s business goal of reducing single-use plastic. Most importantly, we wanted to understand whether this approach would drive deeper engagement with and consideration of Volvo as well as land a key comms message.

By teaming up with Future Thinking, a pioneer in the use of biometric techniques, we could use an array of biometric tools to get to the truth of how viewers engaged with our content at an emotional level, as well as the authenticity of Volvo’s alignment with the environmental issue of single-use plastic.

Two new, culturally relevant and emotive films were made:

• Unseen Ocean – a premium piece of emotive content, inspired by the statistic that 1 in 5 UK children have never seen the sea, follows their journey to see it for the first time with a determination to protect it for future generations.
• Tide of Change – following a progressive family to look at how they used single-use plastics and ways to reduce waste in a more rational and practical way.

In a media-first for sponsorship research, Future Thinking combined Galvanic Skin Response, EEG, heart rate, body temperature, facial expression and eye-tracking techniques to measure subconscious signals from the body, to provide a cutting-edge, rich view of how audiences processed and engaged with the sponsorship content. The insight highlighted the most effective scenes, enabling us to use the research going forward to optimise creative edits and hone down on the key themes and messaging to attract prospects in the future.