Nowadays, marketing and advertisement agencies spend billions of dollars per year to gather focus group and evaluate ads’ emotional impact. Our platform implements physiological reactions measurements (heart-rate, pupil reactions) done via web-camera or quickly off-line (EEG, skin galvanic response, muscle contractions) to provide reliable feedback on whether your advertisement is likeable and influential.
Executive Summary
Problem we solve
Advertisement is one of the major drivers of the contemporary world. One of the most powerful drivers is video advertisement, which is viewed by 100 million users worldwide each day only online and drives 75% of viewers to visit marketer’s website. And there is an emerging trend in creating more emotional advertisement, to touch us and make us buy something. However, the most common video ads assessment tool – focus groups – cost lots of money ($120 mln in USA only each year spent in advertising research) and not as predictive as needed if we speak about emotional influence. It was shown that people are so often unaware of their real emotional state that self-reports are almost useless in assessing emotional influence of an ad. These two factors combined (resource-consuming and not reliable assessment) is a real trouble for marketing agencies doing this kind of research (as we found out from primary market research and interviews).
Our solution
The simplest way to find out information about emotions is to listen to your body. Brain potentials (changes of electrical activity of the brain) and specific patterns of brain reactions are connected with specific emotional states. Eye muscle reactions, breathing patterns, pupil and pulse changes are also representative signals of certain emotions.
The main problem is that advertisers cannot read the consumer's mind and body – yet. But we are working on it. We provide efficient and fast solution – a service for video ads assessment on the basis of brain and physiological reactions. The marketer can use online platform to place ads being analyzed, ads will be shown to target users, whose pupil and breathing reactions as well as heart rate patterns will be measured over the web camera. If the marketer wants, we can supplement these studies with offline brain potentials measurements. All data are used to build and enhance machine learning algorithms used in assessment, so both parts of the service (online and offline) are almost equally precise, offline measures are just specific to a particular advertisement.
Target market and preliminary business model
We are targeting marketing agencies, which are already assessing video advertisement and incorporate emotional measurements into their toolboxes. We run several interviews with them to make sure we are solving a problem painful enough. All marketers interviewed reported using focus groups and self-assessment as a main measurement tool of this kind of study and stated that these measures require a lot of time and monetary resources and often prove to be ineffective. Marketers sometimes hire electroencephalography (brain potentials measurement tool) professionals, but they charge huge amount of money for their services and also perceived as very resource-consuming. From interviews with our potential customers we found out that we best fit into their workflow as a service provider or as a specific product (i.e. the platform). Basic functionality of our online service includes video ad placement and measurements via web-camera (heart rate, breathing rate, pupil reactions). If the customer needs, we also conduct off-line and more sophisticated measurements (i.e. brain potentials or activity of facial muscles responses). It needs to be noticed, however, that online measurements are not less precise (our machine learning algorithm allows to infer missing metrics, such as brain reactions); the customer just gets more customized evaluations with offline measurements. The use of online part of the service comes as SaaS, with initial fee and monthly fees, offline assessment is supposed to be paid for each time it is used. People who watch ads both on- and offline receive small payments for their work.
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