AI-Powered Emotional Ad Matching Lifts Ad Metrics: Wurl’s Crofut

CANNES — Can you put a price on emotions? For advertisers, Wurl, thinks it has found a way.

The company offers tools for video monetization, allowing advertisers to deliver content across various platforms.

Its latest product, BrandDiscovery, allows advertisers to precisely match their ad with the context and emotion of a scene, right before the ad break.

Emotion Before Ads

The product is the result of a year of testing and learning how emotions correlate to better ad performance and engagement.

“When you match emotion to the content or live programming right before the scene and it matches that ad break, you get better performance,” says Peter Crofut, VP of Business Development for Agencies & Brands at Wurl, in this video interview with TVREV co-founder Alan Wolk.

“We see 2x to 3x in our own internal testing and then we’ve seen some really exciting results when testing with brands.”

Emotional Resonance Drives Results

Wurl’s AI scores live programming and ad creative to understand what emotions are contained within, using a model based on psychologist William Plutchik’s famous “wheel of emotions”. The AI is constantly learning and discovering new categories of emotions that work for advertising.

In one test with an agency looking to reach millennial moms, Wurl found that matching sentiment in the video creative with the ad break led to a 7X increase in brand awareness and 2X lift in purchase intent.

Another test for a QSR brand found that high joy anticipation is a precursor to being hungry, driving incremental foot traffic and sales.

Bringing Emotion to Media Planning

Agencies can use Brand Discovery to understand the emotion of their creative and audiences, and then match those to Wurl’s available ad impressions.

Beyond emotional contextual matching, Crofut sees a bright future for AI and machine learning in advertising. He points to innovations like Media.Monks’ AI robot that interviews people and sketches their picture, as an example of the rapid progress in the field.

“It’s a really exciting time to be in our business,” Crofut says. “When we come here next year, I think we’re going to see an explosion in innovation like no other period of time in our industry.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit: Streaming TV & Digital Video, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2024 presented by DIRECTV Advertising, Spectrum Reach, TripleLift & Wurl. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. To view all of Beet.TV’s Cannes Lions 2024 content, please visit this page.