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Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, April 23, 2025 / TRAVELINDEX / Advertising can make or break a destination’s reputation. A well-designed advertising campaign that captures travellers’ imagination can transform an overlooked location into a tourism hotspot. Conversely, a poorly executed ad can discourage visitors and damage a destination’s image for good. Thanks to Professor Mimi Li of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and co-authors, we now know more about one of the most important metrics of advertising effectiveness: emotions. Using cutting-edge electroencephalogram technology, they reveal how children’s emotional responses to tourism ads fluctuate in real time. Their findings will help destination marketers to design more effective and emotionally resonant advertisements.

Advertising plays an essential role in tourism. Well-crafted ads can evoke vivid mental imagery of a destination’s culture, attractions and experiences, creating demand long before the journey begins. Unsurprisingly, therefore, travel organisations invest heavily in mass media advertising.

“These investments have led scholars to consider the effectiveness of advertising messages”, say the authors. An important metric of advertising effectiveness is consumers’ emotional responses, which also stimulate their purchasing behaviour. The domain of tourism is no exception. “The pleasure consumers experience in response to tourism advertisements”, note the researchers, “is positively related to their attitudes toward featured destinations and their intention to visit”.

Yet major gaps remain in our understanding of this crucial barometer of advertising impact. “Significant research on tourism has considered emotions stable and generic”, the authors explain. Yet emotions are far from static; they fluctuate over time in response to experiences. Instead of examining merely their outcomes, “the ultimate evaluation of a subjective feeling, which is normally identified retrospectively after viewing an ad”, we must also consider their temporality.

Indeed, the dynamic and fluid nature of emotional experience has been well demonstrated in other fields, such as music. Unfortunately, however, research on advertising and tourism still lacks insights into how emotions fluctuate in response to stimuli that differ in emotional valence. “Another gap”, say the authors, “is that previous studies have mainly focused on the peak and end moments of an experience but disregarded other moments”. This hampers marketers’ ability to create effective advertising strategies that resonate with viewers at key emotional moments.

To generate actionable insights for destination marketers, the researchers designed an innovative empirical study designed to yield a more nuanced understanding of how customers’ emotions evolve in the process of viewing tourism ads. They employed a neuroscientific approach, specifically electroencephalograpy (EEG), “to investigate individuals’ moment-to-moment emotional fluctuations in response to tourism advertisements with different valences”.

Given children’s growing influence on families’ travel decisions, as well as their unique reactions to marketing stimuli, the authors sampled child participants to shed light on the preferences and needs of this critical yet underexamined demographic. “Advertising has been shown to benefit children”, they note. “Ads can involve entertainment, diversion, purchase-related information, and prosocial messaging that encourages altruistic behaviour”. Thus, investigating children’s responses to advertising has important theoretical and practical implications.

To avoid the potential biases associated with self-reporting one’s emotions, the researchers chose to use implicit measures – inferred from spontaneous behaviour or physiological signals – to measure the children’s emotional experiences in real time. Specifically, they used EEG to directly collect neural electrical signals generated by the children’s central nervous systems in the process of viewing tourism ads. These signals were analysed to determine their real-time physiological and emotional changes.

Sixty-three child volunteers from Fujian province, China watched a series of tourism video ads that differed in emotional tone (valence). The videos were divided into two groups: high and low positive valence. High positive valence was represented by “a Shanghai Disney Resort advertisement including Disney princesses, beautiful castles, pirate boats, gala parties, and fireworks”. An example of low positive valence was a video advertising Chengyu Travel Club, which showed a group of people enjoying a sunset and bonfire in a desert.

To investigate the temporal dynamics of the children’s emotional responses to the ads, the researchers focused on critical moments – also known as “gestalt characteristics” – that represent key milestones on an emotional journey and significantly affect one’s evaluation of that journey. These comprise the beginning (the first impression), the middle, the peak (the most intense moment), the trough (the least intense moment) and the end (the final takeaway).

The experiments were conducted to test a series of hypotheses regarding children’s emotional responses to differently valenced tourism ads, developed based on a rigorous literature review. First, the authors hypothesised that the children would respond differently to high versus low positive valence tourism ads, and that these emotional responses would vary at different moments during the viewing process. Specifically, they posited that ads with more positive valence would elicit stronger emotions at the beginning, middle, peak, trough and end of the experience.

The researchers also hypothesised that the children’s responses would differ with their gender. “Given that females and males have different emotional perceptions and dynamic characteristics”, they say, “a reasonable conjecture is that gender influences people’s emotional experiences in different moments when they watch different valence videos”. Age was also expected to have an impact, given that older children – who are at a more advanced stage of cognitive development – have been shown to have better emotion perception ability.

The authors subjected the children’s EEG data to time-frequency analysis, with instructive results. “The participants did not maintain a completely constant emotional state throughout an ad”, the researchers report. When watching the low positive valence videos, the children’s emotions shifted from positive to negative within about 10 seconds, and then returned to baseline after remaining negative for a certain period. In contrast, videos with a high positive valence led to a trough in emotions at around 25 seconds.

The findings also revealed a critical moment while viewing advertisements”. Of the five focal moments in the children’s emotional journey (beginning, middle, peak, trough and end), the middle moment was found to be the most important in distinguishing between emotional responses to the high and low positive valence ads. In addition, both gender and age partially moderated the impact of video valence on the children’s emotions at this middle moment.

“This research represents a pioneering attempt to investigate the temporal–dynamic features of children’s emotional responses to ads”, the authors tell us. Its findings not only complement and extend empirical research – especially that on the emotions evoked by advertising and the affective experiences of children at different developmental stages – but also provide meaningful guidance for tourism advertising design in the digital age, when perceptions can change with a single click.

By revealing the key moment in children’s real-time emotional responses to tourism ads, namely the middle moment, this study will help advertisement designers to optimise resources at critical points when designing ads for children – an increasingly important yet still overlooked tourism demographic. The findings regarding gender and age will help marketers to specify the market even further. “For example, when targeting younger (7–12 years old) or male child costumers, a better option is to avoid considerable investment in advertisement design”, the researchers conclude.

Mimi Li, Ningning Xing, and Guyang Lin. (2024). Temporal Variation in Children’s Reactions to Tourism Advertisement. Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 107, 103766.

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First published at TravelNewsHub.com – Global Travel News