The holiday season is ripe for ads that pull at your heartstrings — and open your wallets

Pretty much everyone knows — and has maybe even shed a tear because of — that mid-2000s commercial that flashed a montage of sad, abandoned pets in cages while Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" played in the background.

Within its first two years of airing, the ad reportedly netted $30 million in donations for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. More than a decade later, advertisements that pull on people's heartstrings — and open their wallets — continue to be one of the most effective forms of publicity.

And if the NFL's Super Bowl is advertisers', well, Super Bowl, then the Thanksgiving-to-New Year holiday season is the industry's Olympics, making this time of year and all its holiday sentiment a prime time for emotional promotion.

Ninety-five percent of a consumer's purchase decision-making is based on emotions, according to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman. Meanwhile, Proctor and Gamble found positive emotional reactions to ads result in an eight-fold impact on profits and other desired outcomes compared to those that elicited no emotional response.

Minneapolis advertising agents said inciting feelings — whether sobs or laughs — depends heavily on how brands deliver their sales pitches. Just showing the product and price probably won't do much. But a talking dog or perhaps an elderly person reminiscent of a viewer's parent or grandparent using the item could do the trick.

"The most rational thing you could do as a business owner or marketer is to speak to people emotionally," said Lachlan Badenoch, chief strategy officer at Minneapolis-based creative agency Carmichael Lynch.

This special love language between creative agencies and consumers is particularly potent during the holidays.

"These seasons are the perfect time ... for brands to connect with people in a more meaningful way," said Ciro Sarmiento, the new chief creative officer at Minneapolis-based Colle McVoy. "You can carry emotion in a 30-second spot that really makes people feel good about the holidays or feel more connected with their families during the holidays but also is in the action of the brands."

During the holidays, the biggest risk for ad agencies is to go unnoticed, Sarmiento said. Sampling "Jingle Bells" or the opening of the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from the Nutcracker ballet is now seen as a lazy approach, and not including diversity is a no-no as well, he said.

"At Christmas, I look for unexpected stories, and this is the most anticipated season of the year," he said. "For advertising, it can become the most predictable because there's so much."

In Sarmiento's opinion, one ad in particular has managed to rise above the noise this year. Toyota's "Arrivals" commercial depicts various people braving the traffic, weather and general airport chaos to fetch their loved ones — in their Toyotas, of course — for a holiday visit. It ends with the phrase, "Nothing says love like an airport pickup."

"To me, that was really insightful. That's an unexpected story," he said. "You're not saying Christmas, but you say it at the right time in context, and you get it."

Toyota's new commercial might not result in more cars sold, but in this instance, that's perfectly OK, Sarmiento said. Long-run brand awareness is the intended, and likely achieved, result.

While the impact of emotional advertising is clear, the industry has somewhat lost sight of it with the rise of digital promotion and its immediate reactions measured in likes and shares.

Only 40% of sales come from short-term advertising, Badenoch said.

"We don't call people 'people'," Badenoch said. "We call them 'consumers,' and all this sort of language that tends to make us forget that they're people. We forget what we know about ourselves and the people we know."

Eight years ago, Carmichael Lynch developed an algorithm that crawls social media posts for specific brand mentions to determine what draws positive and negative reactions, Badenoch said. The platform, which Carmichael Lynch refers to as its "brand passion index," creates a score based on the kinds of words and phrases attached to a brand as well as the intensity of the language used.

Sentiment analysis is a more effective tool for the agency than questionnaires or self-selected focus groups, Badenoch said. If people are willing to take the time to publicly say how they feel about a brand, that raw, unprompted feedback tells an agency a lot about a targeted audience. That helps formulate a creative plan to either reinforce or change that perception.

"You're getting a real sense of emotion and attitude in a way that's very hard to get with traditional research," Badenoch said.

For its client Subaru, Carmichael Lynch discovered that owners of that brand of car were more likely to own multiple dogs. With this knowledge, the agency created a campaign that focused on adoption for special needs and disabled dogs. And for the past five years, it has worked in partnership with Subaru retailers to help older and disabled dogs find homes through messaging and hosting adoption events.

As a result, engagement for Subaru's brand on social media grew more than 100%.

While marketing research is helpful, an ad firm's job is to turn data into content that people remember for years, Sarmiento said.

"The good ads are the ones who use that data and turn it into magic and gave it a heart," he said. "This month, this season, it has to be that. If it's not, it's not going to work."

Minute-long commercials have affected how Minneapolis couple Kate Pexa and Adam Gottesman live their lives.

A public service announcement about driving at high speeds, in which a speeding car ran over a child, still affects Gottesman's decision-making behind the wheel. Though already environmentally sensitive, an advertisement about global pollution from plastic bottles changed Pexa's outlook on waste and recycling and encouraged her to only use a reusable water bottle.

"It was just heartbreaking," Pexa said.

Pexa and Gottesman viewed those ads at screenings of popular British commercials, known as the British Arrows Awards, at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Since 1986, The Walker has held screenings of the U.K.'s top ads, some more like short films than quick TV spots. This year marked Gottesman's 35th viewing and Pexa's 10th.

Some of this year's ads addressed Alzheimer's disease, sexual harassment, prostate cancer, teenage anxiety and suicide, the latter in the form of a montage showing people in their last moments on camera before taking their lives. It left a cinema of more than 300 people silent for several moments, aside from the sounds of sobbing and sniffles.

"I don't think you can understate the importance of that," said Simon Cooper, board chair of the British Arrows Awards. "Whatever emotion you're stirring, whether it's sadness or joy, sheer entertainment or motivation or fear, any of those things that you might be able to instill in an audience, you're creating emotional engagement.

"You've got 60 seconds to draw someone in, and the way do that is to tug on their heartstrings or kind of shock them to create some kind of emotion."