The Coming Affective Computing Revolution: What it Means for Advertising

Within the next year or two, the new miniaturized Kinect sensor will make interacting with your computer feel like a scene out of Minority Report. The same technology that will let you interact with your computer in a natural and intuitive way will also give your computer the ability to read your body language.

The dawn of affective computing is on the horizon. Ads will soon be micro-targeted to users based on their emotional state. When this shift happens, the advertising industry will quickly be dominated by the first companies to adapt by knowing how best to "affectively" utilize this new technology‒while the rest of the industry are caught blindsided and struggling to adapt. PsychographX wants to make your company one of first to master, and utilize, this disruptive technology.

While face readers, voice tone analyzers, and other technologies will be useful components of the coming affective computing revolution, each has significant limitations that prevent any of them from becoming the most essential biometric. (After all, people don't tend to be very expressive with their faces while watching TV, nor will the TV have frequent chances to hear them speak.) Affect recognition systems must be built upon the backbone of the one biometric measure that can always be measured: body language.

PsychographX has developed the first, and only, patent pending technology for reading body language. We are proud to offer this technology as the backbone of future affective computing systems, and the research from which they will emerge.

At this early stage of the unfolding affective computing revolution, our passion lies in working with the most forward-looking and innovative companies, equipping them with the technology and skills they need to establish themselves as members of the vanguard of the revolution.

If your company prides itself in being on the cutting edge of your industry‒be it advertising, marketing research, media buying, or ad delivery systems‒ PsychographX can provide the strategic technological advantage your company needs to come out on top in the coming affective computing revolution.

The PsychographX Body Language Reader uses the Windows Kinect sensor to read a viewer's body language while they watch TV commercials. The viewer's body language is broken down into three dimensions of expressed attitude: dominance, aggression, and extroversion. These three dimensions are always measurable in a person's posture‒making it a superior method of measuring the affect of someone watching TV (people usually have a pretty blank stare when watching TV, which frustrates attempts to use face readers).

Another advantage that our Body Language Reader has over face readers is that it is capable of predicting which commercial a viewer would most appreciate. Face readers can only confirm that a viewer likes a commercial (but you can always get this from a questionnaire). This makes the Body Language Reader the ideal biometric for the next generation of ad delivery: ad micro-targeting.

Ad Micro-Targeting

TV commercials, or online ads, can be micro-targeted to the user, based on the attitude‒expressed unconsciously in their body language, and read by the Kinect on their TV or computer.

Advertising Research

While this new method of ad delivery will take time to implement, the revolutionary technology at its core is ready to use‒today‒for advertising research. The appeal of an ad, to any one of the three dimensions of the viewer's attitude, can be measured by our system. Advertisers can test their assumptions about what attitudes they are appealing to, using a system that measures attitude objectively‒providing data that is not available through any other method.

Ad Placement

Correlations, drawn between each attitude and a collection of demographic and psychographic attributes, allow for honing-in on the audiences that are most likely to include the highest percentage of viewers with the target attitude.

Concepting

Test two concepts as mock-up videos and see which one is most "affective" with the target attitude.

There are far more applications for this technology than there is space on this page! If you are interested in learning more about our Body Language Reader, please contact us at: info@PsychographX.com

Problem: Millions of dollars of TV ad space is being wasted: audiences are emotionally primed by show content just before starting their commercial break‒but their emotional priming is being wasted because they are seeing random commercials! Little is being done to exploit this primed state that the audience is in.

Solution: Affective Ad Placement. The first 60 seconds of a commercial break, following an emotion priming event, is an elite piece of ad real estate‒what we like to call "primed time." These first 60 seconds, and the priming event that directly precedes it, is identified, validated, and measured using our patent pending Affective Ad Placement system.

These "primed times" are then reserved for the exclusive use of priming-optimized commercials‒commercials that have been tested and certified to appeal to the emotion that the audience was just primed to experience. To use any regular commercial in such a valuable space is a huge waste of profits, for all parties concerned. The TV network, media buyer, and advertiser will all experience increased profits by using the Affective Ad Placement system.

Our Mission: Disruptive Innovation

‒Awaken TV networks to the value hidden in their ad space, and help them unlock this value, by identifying, validating, and measuring emotion priming events, and the primed advertising real estate that directly follows them.

‒Help forward-looking media buyers be the first to cash-in on this disruptive innovation, by identifying, validating, and measuring the increased effect of priming-optimized commercials.

‒Help the most innovative advertising agencies create a new breed of ads: highly-affective ads, priming-optimized commercials that outperform any commercial not produced for such a purpose. With the certainty that over 99% of the people watching the commercial will be emotionally primed in the same way, advertisers will be able to produce the most moving ads ever seen.

PsychographX takes your privacy very seriously.

We are committed to the anonymity of anyone whose posture is read by our body language reader (and all of our products for that matter). Whether it is a research participant or someone seeing ads targeted by our system.

How we protect your privacy:

Research participants: When someone participates in a study using our system their personally identifiable information is not associated with the study data we collect. A random ID is generated for the study and any personal information, such as payment info, is decoupled from the data. As a participant, you will be supplying study data that is completely anonymous.

Viewers of Micro-targeted Ads: With our ad micro-targeting system (which is still in development) viewers' body language is read and used to select a pre-downloaded TV commercial. The body language data is never sent out of your home. Advertisers need to know how many of their ads were seen. To accomplish this we generate a random ID number to make the tally of how many of which commercials were seen anonymous, and send it to a server, where it is mixed together with all of the tallies from other viewers. At this point there is no way of possibly finding out who watched which commercials. The viewer's personally identifiable information is never attached to the tally of which commercials were shown, and attitude measurements are never sent out of the home, so it is never possible for anyone to figure out what your attitude was, or which commercials you were shown.

Protecting your privacy is central to our business policy. Indeed, we believe that the success of our business is dependent on the successful protection of your privacy. For this reason, we take every precaution in protecting your privacy.