Why do audiences choose the content they do?

Viacom’s international consumer insights study, Emotion Is King, provides new insights into the way viewers around the world make their content viewing decisions – and the way that content makes them feel.

To explore the relationship between emotions and content choice, Viacom talked to consumers aged 6-54 in 8 countries around the world*.  This groundbreaking study captured viewers’ decisions in real-time and analyzed their emotions before, during and after watching content.  As part of this, we also created an innovative “emotion library” approach to help audiences all around the world express their emotions in a non-verbal way.  Additionally, we also spoke to experts in human emotions and carried out semiotic analysis of popular content to explore how they use emotions.

We learned that emotions play an important role in almost all content viewing decisions, though we’re not always aware of them.  Having said that, emotions have also recently come to fore in culture and culturally it has become more acceptable to express them.

Content makes us feel a wide range of different emotions and we use content to intensify or modify the emotions we’re feeling.  It’s a virtuous cycle – we feel a certain way so we make certain viewing choices, which in turn make us feel something else.

When it comes to TV and video content, emotions drive our decision-making and in turn the content we watch shapes and molds our emotions.

* Countries included: Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, Sweden, UK