AI Drives Emotional Resonance Between Ads and Content for Better Performance

CANNES — Could artificial intelligence help TV ads resonate better with surrounding content, thereby improving their performance?

That is the premise behind a new contextual ad product from streaming platform Wurl.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VP of advertising engineering Mikey Garcia says the company is using AI to understand and match emotions between ad creative and programming.

Wurl Goes FAST

Garcia explains how Wurl, which distributes and monetizes FAST channels, developed the product, called Brand Discovery, by analyzing conversion data from performance marketing campaigns across connected TV.

“When we have that type of resonance between ad creative and content, we call that emotional resonance.

“Seeing that was enough signal for Wurl to want to pursue a product like Brand Discovery and bring it to our entire pipeline of 60 billion in inventory,” Garcia says.

AI Mimics the Human Brain to Match Emotions

To develop the product, Wurl looked at multi-modal large language AI models which take multiple inputs like audio, text and visuals to produce an output that mimics how the human brain perceives emotions.

The main application for advertisers is driving more positive attention to their campaigns by ensuring emotional resonance between content and ads, according to Garcia.

“When you have emotional resonance between both, the viewer pays attention much more clearly and actually leads to action, which we’ve already shown has demonstrated 200% more efficient cost per engagement across all ad campaigns,” he says.

Bringing Efficiency Through AI

Garcia believes the connected TV landscape allows advertisers more efficiency for targeting, transparency and control than linear TV.

But he says Wurl wants to take that efficiency a step further.

“Wurl wants to take it a step further by combining that with generative AI and our Brand Discovery product, so that way when advertisers actually run campaigns on that medium CTV, we can make sure that they have efficient campaigns and actually achieve true performance,” Garcia adds.