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The Behavioral Barometer
The latest and greatest from your human experience guides at Element Human
The future of measurement is understanding the mind of your consumer - what they feel, not just what they say.
Creator marketing is no longer a niche tactic — it’s a central pillar of modern brand strategy. Budgets are booming (93% of brands plan to increase creator spend this year), creators are shaping culture, and influencer content is outperforming traditional ads in engagement and trust. But there’s a catch: we still don’t know what’s actually working.
Despite the explosion in creator spend, 70% of marketers say they struggle to measure effectiveness. Why? Because most measurement frameworks are stuck in the past — focused on reach, clicks, and CPMs. These metrics tell us what was seen, but not what was felt. And in a world where attention is fragmented and authenticity is currency, feelings are everything.
It’s time to go beyond the feed. Beyond likes and clicks. Beyond Earned Media Value (EMV). The future of creator marketing measurement lies in understanding what happens in the mind of consumers. Measuring what audiences feel, not just what they say. Welcome to the era of emotion-driven measurement — where we don’t just track what audiences do, but how they feel. And that emotional layer may be the missing link in your creator campaign strategy.
Let’s start with a hard truth: creator ROI is often a mirage. Sure, your campaign hit 2 million impressions. But did anyone care? Did they remember your brand? Did it move the needle on trust, consideration, or purchase intent?
Too often, brands default to surface-level metrics like engagement rate or EMV (earned media value). These are easy to track, but they don’t capture the nuance of emotional resonance, tone perception, or subconscious brand association — all of which are critical for long-term brand building.
As Felipe Thomaz of Oxford’s Saïd Business School puts it: “Reach sufficiency is incorrect. We need to do better in understanding how channel mix influences behavior.” In other words, just because someone saw your content doesn’t mean it worked.
Influencer content isn’t just media — it’s culture. It’s the memes we share, the TikToks we quote, the YouTubers we trust more than journalists. And culture is emotional. Emotion drives memory. Emotion drives behavior. And yet, most creator measurement ignores it entirely.
That’s where behavioral science and emotional analytics come in. By layering in tools like facial coding, biometric proxies, and implicit testing, marketers can measure not just what people see, but what they feel — in real time, in context, and at scale. Marketers are now measuring the drivers of human behavior. It's a brave new world indeed!
This beautiful research PDF is brought to us by our friends at MIT, Affectiva, and Northeastern University. The research strongly suggests that emotions in advertising, particularly as measured by facial coding, do drive sales. It's not just about whether an ad evokes emotion, but how and which emotions are evoked, and how those emotions change over time. Using tools like facial coding can provide valuable insights that go beyond traditional surveys to better predict ad effectiveness.
Imagine knowing that your TikTok ad read sparked joy, not cringe. That your YouTube integration built trust, not skepticism. That your Instagram Reel made people feel inspired, not indifferent. That’s the power of emotion-first measurement.
At Element Human, we help brands add this emotional intelligence layer to their creator campaigns. Our approach blends behavioral attention data with emotional response testing to reveal:
These are the metrics that matter in a world where creators are both media and message. Emotion analytics enhance marketing strategies and provide deeper insights into consumer behavior than previously possible.
Take Ford’s recent global creator campaign, where YouTuber Lexie Alford drove an EV around the world. It was bold, cinematic, and culturally resonant. But how do we know it worked? With an emotion-first measurement layer, Ford could have gone beyond views and shares to understand:
By capturing real-time emotional response and memory encoding, Ford could have optimized the campaign mid-flight, identified high-performing segments, and built a case for scaling similar creator partnerships in the future.
As AI-generated influencers and virtual avatars flood the feed, emotional authenticity is becoming the ultimate differentiator. That's what drives us at Element Human. Understanding people, and bringing empathy to the internet at large. AI can mimic style, but not soul. It can generate content, but not connection. That’s why emotional response data is more important than ever. It helps validate what real creators do best — build trust, spark emotion, and move people. And it helps brands avoid the uncanny valley of synthetic influence.
In a world of infinite content and shrinking attention, the brands that win will be the ones that understand not just what people see, but what moves them.
Emotion-driven measurement isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a strategic imperative. And it's possible, very possible to use AI tools for emotion analysis to understand and influence customer emotions effectively. It’s how you optimize creator content for both brand impact and performance, that's what our Human Experience (HX) product is all about.
It’s how you justify spend to the C-suite. And it’s how you build campaigns that don’t just get scrolled past, but remembered. So if you’re still measuring creator success with likes and link clicks, it’s time to upgrade your toolkit. Because in 2025, the most valuable metric in marketing isn’t CPM — it’s connection per moment.
Ready to go beyond what consumers scroll past and get to what actually moves them? Let’s make creator marketing more human — and more effective. Because feelings are the future of marketing. And that future is happening now.
"You guys are excellent partners, and we appreciate the innovativeness."
"We are proud to partner with Element Human to delve even deeper into the emotional impact of creator content on audiences and offer actionable insights, empowering brands to maximise the impact of their influencer marketing campaigns."
"Element Human has been an invaluable partner in showing the business impact creators can have on brand performance."
"They’re responsive, collaborative, and genuinely invested in our success, a rare combination that has made them a trusted partner of mine across multiple companies."
"Creator Economy PSA... Vanity metrics surpassed long ago. Effectiveness, impact and ROI are all measurable with partners like Nielsen, Element Human and Circana."
"Element Human was not just key for the BBC’s project but also was engaging and a great learning experience for me personally!"
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