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Black Americans remain today’s core audience in the media, spending more time with the media than any other U.S. population. Black audiences spend over 81 hours with media each week
In recognizing the potential for fostering authentic connections with Black and multicultural communities, brands are presented with a distinct opportunity.
Research conducted in collaboration between Group Black and Realeyes attempted to shed light on the strategic leverage that Black creators hold in cultivating genuine rapport with audiences.
The goal of the Group Black-Realeyes report was to identify best practices and creative strategies for how brands can work with multicultural creators to elicit heightened attention and positive emotional responses.
Group Black is currently collaborating with Realeyes to further demonstrate the advertising effectiveness of working with Black creators and to co-create a measurement system for its customers that added a layer of attention and emotion data to every test.
The creatives featured athletes from a HBCU sports team, both together as a team and as individuals, discussing how the brand inspired confidence in them so they could perform their best.
One of Group Black’s clients, a beauty brand, wanted to test three sets of creative that each had a 15-second and 30-second ad to demonstrate the power of Black creatives and to understand how the two formats influenced their audiences.
Different platforms demonstrated unique strengths and weaknesses, many of which were close or very similar for both the general population and African American audiences.
YouTube proved most effective at driving attentive seconds and attentive view-through rates (VTR).
Instagram promoted the highest brand recognition among both audiences, even though it had the lowest attentive seconds and attentive VTR.
TikTok was in the middle in several categories, where African American audiences out-performed general audiences by 2% points in terms of brand recognition and 1.2x in ad likeability.
Our research found that using early branding elements was an overwhelmingly powerful decision. It encouraged stronger brand recognition across demographics and channels.
Using personal stories led to more attention on Instagram and TikTok, and significant increases in brand recognition in general population audiences.
Our testing methodology involved evaluating 42 distinct creatives across three major platforms: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The test audience comprised a sample size of 6,610 individuals, of which 2,990 were African American. This study was conducted within the United States, with data collection spanning from July to December of 2023.
The results demonstrate the importance of understanding campaign goals when determining which platforms to prioritize – specifically when capturing and retaining the attention of African American audiences.
“Our partnership with Group Black continues to thrive through the combination of Realeyes’ rich human insights and Group Black’s culturally relevant activations – resulting in outsized impact for brand advertisers,” said Max Kalehoff, CMO at Realeyes. “Group Black’s integration of Attention and Emotion signals into advertising strategy and planning has surfaced profound understanding about the mindsets and motivations of African American versus other communities, how now they respond to social content and advertising.”
Group Black used Realeyes PreView technology to determine the optimal advertising strategy for its Fortune 500 beauty client.
Mars Inc, scales creative testing using attention, predictive models, and achieves 29% ROI with PreView
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