Beer, Trucks or Charmin? AT&T Says it Knows Which Ad Spot Should Follow This Emotional Scene

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Negan just killed a major character on "The Walking Dead" or Jack just suffered a major heart attack on "This Is Us", which commercial should follow such an emotional scene? Choose right and you've connected with the viewer on a deep, emotional level. Choose wrong and your product may be seen as incongruent, in bad taste, or worse, simply forgotten. 
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“Contextual fluency,” meaning a message is consistent with the content surrounding it, also helps viewers process ads easier.
Laney Lewis, IBM Watson Media
AI Video Technology, Jul. 25, 2017
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With video becoming the dominant ad vehicle across multiple channels, matching content with the most effective ad is the newest "Holy Grail" large and small players alike are seeking. Just this week AT&T was granted  US10194214 B2 Device, method and machine-readable storage medium for presenting advertising related to emotional context of received content. By using "Multimodal Sentiment Analysis", Simon Byers, the named inventor, offers a "Contextual Intelligence Platform" to help advertisers target the correct audience and system to insert the advertisement.

The system described not only determines the emotional context of a scene but can generate metadata classifying the emotional content, i.e., positive, neutral or negative, along with contextual details that can then populate a database. 
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FIG. 1

FIG. 2

"​FIG. 1, the program scene 102 represents a dramatic head-on car collision. A service provider of media content containing program scene 102 can present a first advertisement 104 which promotes car insurance, or a second advertisement 106 which promotes car sales. In the illustration of FIG. 2, the program scene 202 represents an animation scene depicting a child viewing a thermometer during what appears to be very cold weather noticeable by the puff of smoke from the child's breath. A service provider of media content containing program scene 202 can present a first advertisement 204 for promoting a warm beach vacation, or a second advertisement 106 for promoting an ice cold soft drink." from US10194214 B2.
 
​The move is on to better match emotional level of program content with that of the ad spot.  NBCUniversal announced in November their intent to use a machine learning tool that helps brands place ads around scenes relevant to their product. Seeing this trend, DoubleVerify acquired Leiki in December of last year. DoubleVerify, a marketing measurement software and analytics provider, saw Leiki's semantic AI and contextual video capabilities a natural addition to DV's brand reputation services.
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Major brands’ content was found to be appearing next to videos promoting extremist views or hate speech, with a cut of the advertising spend going to the creators.
Olivia Solon The Guardian
 Sat 25 Mar 2017​

The goal is not merely matching the emotional levels between content and ad, but protecting brand reputation as well. Contextual intelligence can also prevent an ad being run in close proximity to objectionable content. Grapeshot, a contextual intelligence provider acquired by Oracle last year, looks to add "Brand Safety" to its suite of contextual intelligence products. ​
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Learn more...

• Consumers' Response to Commercials: When the Energy Level in the Commercial Conflicts with the Media Context. Nancy M. Puccinelli, Keith Wilcox, and Dhruv Grewal (2015) Journal of Marketing: March 2015, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 1-18.
• Video scene retrieval with interactive genetic algorithm. Yoo, HW. & Cho, SB. Multimed Tools Appl (2007) 34: 317. "This paper proposes a video scene retrieval algorithm based on emotion"
• Emotion In Advertising: The Difference Between A Spark And A Backfire. Derek Rucker, Forbes, Oct. 5, 2017.
  
• Emotions and Advertising: How We Connect to Brands. Kelly Fong, October 12, 2015