The Future of Biometric Audience Targeting in the Attention Economy

The world of digital media is defined by constant evolution.

From cable TV to DVDs to YouTube, the digital age has ushered in wave after wave of transformation in how videos and films are produced, marketed, and delivered to audiences.

Like clockwork this will continue at an ever-increasing speed, leaving those who don’t adapt in the dust. I want to highlight a new innovation that is going to disrupt the world of media yet again: Biometric audience feedback and real-time emotion tracking.

What is this technology and why is it important? This article will give you insights into how biometrics can revolutionize your audience engagement KPIs. But before we see what the world of media has to gain from this new technology we must first understand what the world lost during the digital transition of the early 2000s.

As it stands today the production and distribution of film and video is a one-sided process. After video content is produced, the majority of it is pushed to a mass audience through web-based platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, and various other providers that allow consumers to digest it on their smartphones, computers, and TVs.

This goes against our nature because from a primal perspective humans evolved as storytellers that communicated face to face. We saw and read each other’s emotions and adapted our messages to maximize engagement. When you talk to someone you see how their face changes and you can use this instant feedback to judge whether they enjoy talking to you.

Effective communication is a two-way street, not a one-way paradigm that defines the traditional internet media world. It’s the difference between a tone-deaf lunatic who yells at the crowd vs a skilled orator who reads the mob’s mood and mobilizes their sentiments towards a unified end goal.

Forging a hyper-tailored brand experience is only possible when you impact the raw emotions of your audience because people buy based on emotions, not logic. Our brains are hardwired that way: this fact can be leveraged. From a neuroscience perspective, 95% of consumer purchasing decisions are subconscious and emotion is what drives purchasing behaviors (Harvard University, Gerald Zaltman). Attention and audience engagement is a multi-billion dollar industry that is in its early growth stage.

There is wisdom in the old adage “What gets measured gets managed”. As we want to impact the emotional states of our audience we must begin with the right kind of data. Conventional metrics such as ‘likes’, ‘shares’, ‘views’, and ‘comments’ are useful, but they are also superficial compared to the insights found in the real time quantification of your audience’s fear, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust and happiness as they interact with your media.

Seeking to create more personalized experiences for consumers and to ensure positive engagement on an individual level, film and video agencies are leveraging biometric focus groups to track the emotions of viewers as they interact with their video content. Here is a quick summary of how the process works.

To run a biometric study a focus group provider needs to recruit a number of audience members to view the video, normally 20 to 30 people. These individuals are paid to watch video content in a controlled environment, usually a laboratory, where various biometric sensors have been set up to detect the physiological, mental, and emotional states of each person in real-time during viewing.

This includes eye tracking devices that see which part of the screen the audience is looking at as well as facial recognition technology that maps the micro-expressions each person instinctually makes. Some sensors even track heart rate, brain wave activity and/or the conductivity of skin. This seems like a lot of data, true. But the real question is what can be done with this all of this information.

Now that we’ve covered the basics here are five ways you can use real-time emotion data to drive your audience engagement KPIs and create a hyper-tailored brand experience:

1. Split-testing using emotional response lets post producers compare video clips to isolate specific moments that consistently make audience members laugh or smile. Highlighting which clips are emotionally unengaging and need more work ultimately leads to a better end product.
2. Marketing campaigns can be optimized by targeting audience personas built using emotionally reactivity. If data shows millennials expressed the most happiness while watching your film, you’re more likely to build a loyal long-term fanbase if you invest your marketing dollars towards this target segment. An emotional audience is also lot more likely to share your content with their friends.
3. Tracking the raw emotions of your audience lets you transcend cultural and language barriers to understand how the global community will receive the video. This lets you compare people’s raw emotions across religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, as well as age, gender, income levels and other demographic traits.
4. In a world of shifting social norms and viral crowd mentality, it is important to identify and avoid releasing content that sparks social backlash that catastrophically damages your brand reputation. Biometric focus groups lets you see if people view your content as politically insensitive before you publicly share it.
5. Maximize revenues by using emotional engagement data to predict the commercial success of your videos. These insights reduce uncertainty and let you allocate your financial resources to buy airtime for the best content in your portfolio.

Hopefully this article has shown you the benefits of using emotion audience analytics in the production and distribution process.

Technology has given us a chance to reclaim a raw primal connection that we as media creators have lost with our audience.

I’d like to end by sharing a concluding quote from industry leader, Ben Tam, CEO of www.Rizound.com.

“Our company mission is to democratize this technology so that every creative individual has the power of emotion analytics — — Not just big budget producers or political campaign managers like Cambridge Analytica.

Rizound is now the world’s largest pipeline for high-fidelity audience biometrics. Rather than rely on a small subset of local participants we invested in a global platform that vertically integrated the entire process and turbocharged it using artificial intelligence.

I’m proud to note that in the Q4 2018 we onboarded roughly a thousand new biometric freelancers across North America, Asia, Europa, and Africa. This scale of operation lets us complete experiments in a matter of hours, unlike other providers that require weeks or months. Our users enjoy the savings as we charge them a fraction of market cost and they also get access to our full software suite of audience analytic tools with every focus group they order.

Audience biometrics is an bold new field and at the end of the day I believe that the most successful providers will transform all of this complex data into fun actionable insights that everyday creatives can understand. Contemporary media is an art, but it can also be a science.”