Elna Schutz is a business reporter.
Kerry was working on a project with a drumming gorilla when she was in 2007.
An actor in a gorilla suit plays the drums in a TV advert for Dairy Milk chocolate.
The ad went on to be voted the UK's favourite, after sales of the chocolate soared.
The advert was made by a senior figure in the in-house marketing team. The piece might never have seen the light of day.
She says that the ad was finished within the company for nine months before anyone would let it out.
The ad was thought to not do well with customers. A drumming gorilla has nothing to do with chocolate.
Ms Collinge and her colleagues believed it would be a hit. She went to a London-based company called System1 for a second opinion. The system doesn't ask participants if they like an advertisement.
The drumming gorilla got an extremely positive score when he watched the ad and recorded his emotional responses to it. The ad was released to widespread praise after Ms. Collinge reported it.
She says she used the testing to give confidence that the ad would work.
It is difficult for a person to say they are not influenced by advertising. The amount of money companies spend on advertising their products and services has never been higher in the digital world.
According to one study, this year global ad-spend will reach $706 billion. Digital advertising now accounts for more than half of the total, up from 42% in 2019.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the problem is I do not know which half, according to Henry Ford, the US car industry pioneer.
Retailers are using high-tech ad-testing firms more often to make sure their adverts are successful.
The UK firm, Kantar, is working on these. A person's emotional response to being shown an advert is a focus of the online testing system. One way it can do this is by connecting to a tester's laptop and using facial-mapping software to watch their reactions.
This type of more sophisticated testing is in high demand.
Companies want to advertise their products on a large number of platforms. There may be a need for a different advert for the same product.
She says that the real challenge for clients is making it all integrated and part of the same campaign, as well as how to measure it.
Ms Collinge is the director of marketing and partnerships for System1. The system asks the tester to reveal their emotional response to an advert by clicking on a small graphic of a human head on their screen.
Each picture has an emotion written underneath it. The choices are contempt, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sad, and neutral.
We don't want to ask people what they're going to do, because we know that's not very Predictive of how an advert is going to perform
We want to measure what their natural feeling is, what their natural emotion is, and what all those basic emotions are. We can see which parts of an ad are working or not.
The ultimate goal is for clients to get both accurate short and long-term sales predictions, and additional metrics like finding out whether the brand of the company is recognisable and familiar to customers or not.
New Tech Economy explores how technological innovation will shape the new economic landscape.
It is cheaper to use online ad-testing than in-person testing or market surveys according to the chief operating office of US software firm Momentive. Momentive is also the owner of SurveyMonkey.
It doesn't take a lot of money to run a large ad-test. That is one major difference.
Nicole Cheong is from South Africa. She recently reviewed an alcohol advertisement that included wheelchair users but felt the survey questions were leading, probing her reaction to people with disabilities in adverts.
It was a cute story and touching, but it did not fit with the product for me.
System1 and Toluna both say that their prices can be as low as 5% of an advert's campaign budget.
If brands can now test their ads in more depth, what makes a good one? How can a retailer and its advertising agency plan for the future?
Stuart Duff, a psychologist with Pearn Kandola, says that brands should focus on hope if they want to reach customers.
Emotions are important to our memory because we don't remember factual or bland information easily. What are the three most powerful feelings? Fear, guilt and hope are what I would suggest.
Hope is associated with feelings of joy and relief, and can be used to escape fear and guilt. It is hope that we can move forward and trust the product.
Will Smale is editor of the New Tech Economy series.
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