Original Research / 2026
A Black Iris Films analysis of 742 Instagram Reels and TikTok videos found emotion-led posts were 2.1x more likely to break into the top quartile of engagement.
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Why is finance the top industry for emotion?
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The Emotion Hierarchy
If you asked most marketing teams what kind of emotional content performs best, they'd probably say humour, or something that grabs attention. The data disagrees. There are seven emotion types in this study, and the gap between the ones that work and the ones that don't is bigger than you'd expect.
The winning family, empathy, pride, belonging, aspiration, and trust, hits the top quartile 39% of the time. The losing family, humour, fear, and curiosity, hits it 16.7% of the time. After accounting for brand differences, the winning group is 3.3x more likely to break out (p<0.001).
These emotions work because they mirror what someone feels during a big financial or career decision: recognition, a sense of identity, confidence about the future. They go somewhere real. The losing emotions, however attention-grabbing, tend to stay on the surface.
The emotion should be named in the brief before a single frame is storyboarded. Not "emotional content" - which emotion, specifically. Empathy, belonging, aspiration, or trust. That decision belongs upstream, not in the edit.
* Directional only - based on n=20
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