Meet Dixan

Dixan is Henkel's laundry detergent brand in Italy and a familiar name in Italian households for generations. 

Competing in one of the most crowded categories in home care, the brand combines everyday cleaning performance with a long-standing connection to family life and care at home.

The Challenge

Dixan competes in a category where rivals already own the emotional territory of family and care. Interest-based targeting alone could reach the right audience, but reach alone could not win back that claimed ground.

The brand needed proof that pairing interest with the right emotional signal could move ad recall and brand perception together, not just clicks.

The objective was clear:

Demonstrate, in a controlled test, what an emotional layer adds on top of interest-based targeting, in both media performance and brand impact.

The Solution

To meet this challenge, Dixan partnered with Seedtag to run a controlled test on Seedtag's Neuro-Contextual technology for the Open Web, in Italy during Q2 2026.

Using Liz, Seedtag’s Neuro-Contextual AI, the campaign mapped Dixan's home care content into five audiences, from Pet Lovers and Owners to Care Comfort Families. Each audience was then read through its dominant emotional signal (Trust, Optimism or Joy), drawn directly from the Neuro-Contextual Graph rather than assigned upfront.

Every audience ran on two parallel line items: one on interest alone, and one on interest plus its emotional signal. With the same audience, period, and format on both lines, the ten line items were designed to isolate the contribution of the emotion layer. Across the test, a clear pattern emerged: interest builds relevance, emotion builds memory. Media performance leaned towards the interest-only lines, brand impact leaned towards emotion, and attention rose with the emotional signal 

The strongest evidence came from Care Comfort Families, the audience selected for the brand study. There, interest plus emotion was the only layer to move Ad Recall positive, while interest alone saw recall decline vs. control. The same audience delivered the test’s highest attention, above benchmark, and the strongest brand preference lift. More consumers also saw Dixan as reliable compared with the control group.

Interest alone still performed better on familiarity and functional claims, showing that each layer plays a different role in the funnel.

Throughout the flight, Liz also measured media performance of every emotion detected in Dixan's content, not only the three planned. Admiration and Desire outperformed Trust, Optimism, and Joy mid-flight, identifying the emotional levers to prioritize in the next always-on phase.

These results proved that combining interest-based targeting with the right emotional signal does more than reach the right audience: it builds the brand memory and perception that reach alone cannot.