Emotions matter. They drive consumer behavior and influence brand perception. Creative agencies know: emotions are key in the work you do for your clients.

Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat states that: “Highly successful companies and brands such as Apple, VISA, T-Mobile, Red Bull, Autodesk, Dove, Ritz-Carlton and P&G invest heavily in emotional marketing and experiences. Given the knowledge that emotional marketing is highly effective, companies that invest in emotion recognition technology can gain a critical competitive advantage. The technology can provide marketers with emotion analytics and insights to improve their marketing messaging, creative, and execution, as well as to optimize digital campaigns, content and sites.”

That’s where we come in: Affectiva, the Emotion AI Company

We get it. Our emotion recognition technology helps you improve strategic advertising and develop uniquely engaging consumer experiences that dynamically adapt to human emotion. Emotion AI gives your clients that edge and sets you apart from your competition.

So how can you integrate Emotion AI in your client campaigns? Well, here are some emotion-enabled campaign ideas to get you started:

1) Million-Smile Project

For brands who value smiles (like Coca-Cola or Colgate), the goal is to collect a million images of people smiling across the world. Would feature an interactive map you could click on showing where each photo was taken. Encourage people to take interesting pictures with landmarks in the background, Eiffel Tower in Paris, cows from your farm in Wisconsin, etc. Then offer prize incentives as awards to the best images.

2) Create an app that reads target customer emotions

A brand could develop an app for a target demographic that identifies the emotion of someone in their life. For example, Pampers could create a “What’s My Baby Thinking?” app so you can record how your baby is feeling, or Petco could roll out a “What’s My Dog Thinking?” app.

3) Emotionally Responsive Music Apps

For apps like Spotify or Pandora, skip the manual selection process for users and offer up playlists based on facial expressions and emotions of the user.

Users can also like songs by just making a facial expression instead of scrambling to “thumbs up” a song quickly before it ends. From a paid ads perspective these apps provide for its free users, imagine what kind of insights they could deliver back to advertisers based on how they emote to an ad presumably targeted to them.

4) Emotion-Enabled Health Care

From CVS retail locations to web applications like Web MD, have users’ emotions interpreted while experiencing pain or being asked questions about their health to aide in medical diagnosis or to determine the best products to make them feel better. 

5) Emotionally Interactive Menus for Restaurants

Virtually any chain restaurant - from Olive Garden, Panera, Arby’s, Uno’s and all those in between - can help customers pick their ideal meal choice based on their emotional reactions to their menus.

Emotion Enabling Campaigns for Brands: It’s Happening Today and It’s Working.

One of our more recent examples would be with The Bentley Inspirator: a luxury commissioning app experience. Users are guided through an immersive film that is shaped, directed and inspired by facial and emotional reactions.

Based on their measures of engagement – all captured by their device’s camera – specific car models are recommended, in addition to the rationale behind why certain colors and materials were suggested, and how interactions with the video content resulted in the final recommended vehicle suggestion.

As with any product that can be customized, what if brands offered similar apps that offered to personalize a product based on how the viewer responded emotionally to certain images? Similar to what Bentley did with their inspirator app, brands could play with relating certain visuals to specific variations of their products - from colors to flavors, and everything in between.

Want more? Get the full guide!

If you’re anxious to get your hands on this emotion recognition technology for your next client pitch or are still looking for more inspiration for something fresh to present for an upcoming campaign, download our full guide for emotion campaigns. Including the above ideas, there are 20 innovative concepts just waiting for the right person to make into a reality. There are also some additional case studies to help your proof of concept - around those who have already put emotion AI tech to use. We hope you enjoy the guide - and don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to talk through adding emotion tech to your own idea!