Emotion AI: The Heart of Marketing Innovation

What we need to do

The opportunity is to take these learning and build them into a system to activate emotion-based advertising at scale. Here are three ways we can get started.

Re-categorize media according to emotionality

To activate emotionally aligned media at scale, we need a system that scores the emotionality of content. This has been possible to an extent, through machine learnings based on content interactions, but is missing the opportunity we now have to use real human inputs (not proxies, like clicks, time-spent and engagement rates) to truly rank media according to emotion. For example, a new app, Happy Cam captures unconscious emotional reaction to content by reading facial expressions. It then categorizes the actual emotions that the content has triggered in others. We should accelerate the scale of such applications to scale emotionally indexed content.

Recalibrate role of paid media to scale emotion

The opportunity is to re-focus media budgets on scaling the emotional content. Emotional content spreads 10x more than interest-oriented content on its own. The opportunity with paid media is that it spreads that much further, targeted to the most relevant target consumers. Instead of interest-based lookalikes, we can start to build emotional profiles of our customer base, and then scale by identifying emotionally similar consumers and moments.

Emotional response rates: the new KPI

Contempt can mean losing customers, while Joy is effective at driving a sale. We already know that emotion has a direct correlation with marketing impact. Building out these correlations, establishing benchmarks and using them as KPIs in our media plans could be game-changing. Instead of optimizing for exposure, clicks and other proxies for engagement, what if we optimized advertising to emotional response rates, with known correlations to business impact?

With the emergence of emotion AI, we finally have the opportunity to put emotion at the very heart of marketing. A more effective system than the rather broken one we have in place today, and which can cater to emerging user interfaces of VR and AR, which are geared to creating more emotionality.