Movies are full of highs and lows, plot twists, and bursts of action and dialogue. Understanding how viewers respond to such lively and fluctuating content in real time is challenging. In recent work, HKUST’s Wenbo Wang and colleagues developed a novel construct, “moment-to-moment synchronicity” (MTMS), to capture viewers’ engagement with dynamic movie content. This measure could prove invaluable for marketing practitioners and video content producers alike.

Movies, video games, and even sports events are characterised by content that unfolds dynamically over time. Increasingly, companies are seeking ways to track consumer engagement across the course of such dynamic experiences. Disney, for example, recently invested more than US$1 billion in a wristband that tracks the movements and consumption behaviour of theme park visitors. Collecting real-time data on users’ dynamic experiences of products and services will aid in “understanding drivers of overall product evaluation, designing more effective advertisements, and forecasting product demand,” say the researchers.

The rise of social media has brought new opportunities to gather such real-time information. For instance, popular streaming websites allow viewers to chat and comment while watching their favorite movies. Live comments posted online yield cheap, naturalistic, and plentiful data, making them “particularly useful to studies of long and dynamic consumption contexts,” note the researchers.

Seizing the opportunity afforded by such rich data, the authors developed the concept of MTMS, which reflects the degree to which viewers’ live comments are synchronised with dynamic movie content. This, say the researchers, captures “a movie’s ability to engage viewers.” A more engaging movie prompts more real-time comments from online fans, resulting in greater MTMS. “Such active participation often indicates the viewers’ strong narrative engagement,” the researchers explain, “such that they are acting as if they are inside the scenario described in the narrative.” However, the opposite may also be true. “When consumers get distracted or bored with the content,” warn the researchers, “the level of synchronization may drop.”

Drawing on the principles of “film grammar”, the authors first created temporal profiles of 507 movies, measuring their dynamic content in terms of shot duration, camera motion, volume, pitch, and dialogue. Next, to capture audience engagement, they calculated the MTMS between the movies’ profiles and viewers’ real-time reactions in comments. The final step was to test whether MTMS predicted movie appreciation, which was measured using consumer ratings and the number of “coins” (virtual currency) awarded to a movie by its viewers.

MTMS was found to accurately predict viewers’ appreciation of movies—especially suspenseful ones. “Managerially, MTMS is a valuable metric that helps to predict viewers’ appreciation of content,” conclude the authors, “and to track viewer engagement during different periods of an experience.” This has exciting implications for content producers. Audience feedback plays a major role in the production of movies and TV shows, and gathering MTMS data during a test screening could guide decisions on editing or which shots to use in a trailer.

While eye tracking and analysis of neural activity are already used to measure in-consumption engagement, examining the synchronicity of live comments is an innovative approach with boundless potential. The authors’ novel construct of MTMS could be used to measure engagement with and create more captivating content for virtually any form of dynamic entertainment. Their study thus heralds a new era of “social listening” in today’s ever-changing online environment.