Came across a post on another blog about emotion over message in advertising…

“Advertisements with high levels of emotional content enhanced how people felt about brands, even when there was no real message.However, advertisements which were low on emotional content had no effect on how favourable the public were towards brands, even if the ad was high in news and information.”

I’ve been pushing this same idea from an interactive standpoint… that the emotion and story being told through a website is as powerful, if not more so, than the parts and components (which is a nice segue to yesterday’s post about the demise of wireframes).

Read the full press release (PDF) here.

Not sure how these findings relate to the interactive experience, since the experience of watching a commercial is inherently different from interacting with something. At any rate, it points the way to using emotion to communicate. Communication isn’t tied to a specific medium, television, the internet, or others. Ergo, emotion should work online as it does in commercials. We’ll have to put that to the test…

Found on Living Brands via Russell Davies.