Smile, You’re on Camera: The Future of Emotional Advertising
By: Ali Goldsmith
Tags: Marketing, Psychology, Emotions, Digital Marketing, Advertising

Smile, You’re on Camera: The Future of Emotional Advertising

For those worried about “Big Brother,” you should probably stop reading now. There is a new technology on the market that takes behavioral tracking to a whole new level.

Born from MIT’s Media Lab, Affectiva allows advertisers to record and analyze human emotional responses based on subtle, involuntary facial cues. The insights generated by this software completely surpass other creative testing methods by providing a treasure trove of accurate, objective and on-demand data.

Affectiva requires no $40K eye-tracking goggles or other extraneous technology, just your own computer. By tapping into any webcam’s existing functions, Affectiva can scan faces for subtle micro-shifts. The slightest uptick of an eyebrow or twitch of the mouth could indicate an emotional response to content. In real time, Affectiva catalogues facial movements and displays results almost immediately after completion of the video.

My Affdex data after watching Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” ad. It gets me every time!

Not only does Affectiva track key emotions like happiness, sadness and anger, it also has the potential to detect cultural nuances. Its software is now able to catch the “politeness smile,” an expression prevalent in Southeast Asia and India but rare in the Americas, Africa and Europe. As its database of faces expands and Affectiva’s “emotional AI” continues to grow in complexity, advertisers will be able to predict and decipher unique emotional responses to their work across cultures, genders and national borders.

This technology also solves the age-old dilemma of advertisers and psychologists alike. While tests and surveys can attempt to gauge emotional responses to ads before, during and after exposure, their results are often subjective and not generalizable to the natural environments where consumers would actually watch them. However, Affectiva’s technology can be used on any device, anywhere in the world. When using this technology, the only cue that hints you’re in a study is the light that comes on next to your webcam.

You might be wondering, are brands watching me right now? Do they have a databank of videos of me crying to TD Bank’s #TDThanksYou ads? The answer is no, do not worry. Affectiva’s services are explicitly opt-in and require consent from the end user. We reached out to Affectiva to see how exactly they recruit subjects and will update this when we receive a response. In the meantime, you can try Affectiva out for yourself here.

So, this is cool and all, but how can we use it to optimize ads? The information generated by Affectiva can be used to amplify key emotional moments, help place a call to action, or just prove that an ad is objectively awesome. The output of Affdex Discovery, Affectiva’s ad analysis software, clearly maps out the levels of surprise, smile, concentration, dislike, valence, attention, and expressiveness throughout a video. It also segments the data by age-group and gender, allowing marketers to see reactions specific to their target demographic. Best of all, performance on Affdex tests can accurately predict sales growth. Nice.

Affectiva is truly disruptive, even beyond advertising. Its technology has been used to build an app that helps people with Autism get real-time feedback on social interactions and in a video game that adapts to the player’s emotions. For brands, Affectiva represents a way to avoid the nemesis of emotional advertising, neutrality. Unilever, Kellogg’s, Mars and CBS are already on the bandwagon…who’s next?