By Amira Di Costanzo, Marketing and Growth Director, Aryel
Advertisers have long been constrained by the inherent limits of traditional demographic data — which are only narrowing as third-party cookies become phased out, and regulatory restrictions on data collection are increasingly imposed. This has led many to use one-size-fits-all marketing approaches to bluntly target users whose needs and habits they don’t fully understand, which, naturally, has resulted in wasted ad spend and unrealised business KPIs.
However, we now stand at the dawn of a new golden age of display advertising all about capturing user emotion. Cutting-edge innovations powered by Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are enabling marketers to understand their audiences on a deeper level than ever before, position their offerings with utmost accuracy, and maximise the emotional impact of their display ads — without relying on third-party cookies.
Emotion metrics are a development that’s leading a new wave of display advertising, merging with organisations’ existing data stacks to form a holistic data strategy and drive meaningful customer experiences.
Knowing your audience: a revolutionary step forward
AR and AI user analytics can expand on conventional demographic data to encompass information around facial features, emotion metrics, product attention spots, and time spent on ads. This intelligence provides an abundance of valuable data for advertisers to create more impactful campaigns, while always maintaining full compliance with evolving privacy regulations, and transparency to consumers viewing these ads.
For instance, bespoke facial recognition technologies that take frames from the user’s camera can, with increasing accuracy, gather real-time first-party insights about audience reactions when viewing advertisements or branded content in AR.
Going further, these innovations can leverage detailed 3D heat maps of products, highlighting specific product attention spots that captivate the most interest; taking into account every zoom, virtual touch, and pivot. This feature tells marketers which aspects of their offerings resonate the most with which users, allowing subsequent marketing campaigns to be personalised towards each user with nuanced preferences in mind.
Similarly, advertisers can measure the time spent on ads and use it as a new metric for retargeting users — acting as an AR equivalent of view-through rate metrics for conventional display ads.
Brands leveraging AR rich media formats through applications that incorporate the user’s face, such as virtual try-ons, camera effects and AR filters, AR quizzes and surveys, and AR minigames can swiftly capture these analytics when equipped with state-of-the-art AI tools that can measure and analyse them.
Better capturing, better understanding, better offerings
Typically, advertisers have measured the effectiveness of their campaigns with quantitative metrics such as impressions, clicks, views, CTR, and conversion rates. However, this new wave of comprehensive emotion metrics allows a deeper level of insight into consumers’ decision-making.
For example, if it is known that many users experience positive emotions when interacting with a certain product, but don’t make the purchase, then advertisers may have reason to review their pricing, target audience, or value proposition — not the product. This type of insight can also supercharge advertisers’ understanding of their demographics, going beyond basic information such as gender and age to hair colour, face shape, and eye colour, which can directly influence advertising strategies and even product design choices in future marketing campaigns.
What’s more, previously, emotional state data has only been available through expensive lab-based testing or audience surveys, which, respectively, are inaccessible for most businesses seeking comprehensive and efficient data collection solutions, and hold significant room for bias as participants were aware they were being tested. Collecting emotional state data in-flight, using built-in AR and AI software, on the other hand, provides more authentic and representative insights while significantly cutting costs and complexities for marketers.
In this way, entire addressable audiences can be targeted with granular precision in real-time, allowing hyper-personalisation of marketing campaigns at an unprecedented scale.
The road to more intelligent advertising
As the advertising industry navigates the challenges of a cookieless future, the development of tools that facilitate crystal-clear understanding of how specific audiences respond emotionally to certain types of content, is set to be a vital asset; offering a sophisticated and premium-quality targeting solution.
Advertisers that utilise these existing and developing tools — harnessing both traditional and novel advertising metrics — can implement Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) strategies, tailor their campaigns in line with comprehensive audience data, and provide groundbreaking levels of personalisation to audiences with AR display ads at scale. As a result, they can ensure maximal memorability of ads, superior engagement of audiences, and enhanced conversions from campaigns.
