A New Era of Predictive Video Content Effectiveness: Emotional Analytics
By
Modar (JR) Alaoui
Brands and movie production companies have long struggled with measuring viewers’ true emotions in response to video content. They are constantly looking for innovative ways to predict engagement and high resonance with the audience.
This is where Eyeris comes in play. Founded in 2012, the company spun off from an earlier venture of a facial recognition measured in-store TV network franchise that broadcast video advertisements based on viewers’ gender and age group.
The company’s flagship product EmoVu, is an artificially intelligent emotion recognition software that reads people’s facial micro-expressions in real-time as they watch videos on their computers or mobile devices via regular webcams.
The technology finally solves the mystery for video content owners of knowing how people react to which scene of the video, with unprecedented accuracy, on a second-by-second level, generally before committing millions of dollars on airing risky content.
Among the 24-dimensional metrics that the company offers, are seven universal emotions (joy, surprise, sadness…etc), five engagement metrics (expressiveness, attention, valence…etc), multiple mood indicators, gender and age groups, as well as other contextual metrics related to head pose, gaze estimation, eye activity…etc. All data is then segmented by 210 DMA’s (designated market areas) and then aggregates dynamically on one intuitive dashboard.
The scalable cloud-based platform allows video content creators to upload their videos and share them with thousands of emotive respondents to gauge their emotional responses. Viewers opt-in to allow access to their camera and then watch naturally. The non-privacy invasive solution processes facial expressions data in the cloud in near real-time and displays results for consumption on EmoVu dashboard seconds after the video completes.
This wealth of predictive emotional analytics allows content owners to validate or re-evaluate their creative and then make actionable decisions that are scientifically unbiased. For example, they can discover that 78% of male audiences in New York had smiled at second 12, as opposed to the same demographics in the Midwest who didn’t get the joke. From there, creative can be adjusted to either create two separate videos knowing that each one of them is highly emotionally engaging to its respective market; or the script can be reviewed with a message that appeals more to the mass audience.
In an era where garnering individualized users’ attention and stimulating their emotional responses is of the utmost importance to brands, studios, TV networks and online original content creators, EmoVu not only measures these interactions but also can predict video content effectiveness like no other method.
JR Alaoui is a serial entrepreneur and expert in Artificial Intelligence software development. He is currently founder and CEO at Eyeris, an emotion recognition software that reads people’s facial micro-expressions in real time as they watch videos via webcams. Prior to that, he was founder and CEO of Eyeris TV, the first US facial recognition measured in-store TV network franchise, the company targeted short-bite video content and advertisements in real-time based viewers gender and age group. Mr. Alaoui combines a decade experience between rich media, video AdTech and AI-based Software Technologies for audience measurement. He has worked closely over the years with the Ad Council, top ad agencies and fortune 500 brands. He holds an Integrated Marketing Communications degree from Concordia University. He is a winner of several Technology and Innovation Awards and has been featured in many publications for his work.
