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Millward Brown and Affectiva team up to assess emotional impact

Research firm Millward Brown has teamed up with emotion measurement technology company Affectiva to better assess the emotional impact of television ads.

The partnership will integrate Affectiva’s facial expression analysis technology with Millward Brown’s ad copy-evaluation and optimization solution (Link).

The two firms hope this will allow brand owners to get better analysis and insight into their advertising.

“Describing feelings in detail is never easy. By adding facial expression analysis to Link, brand owners can get at the emotional response that people might not be able to articulate in surveys,” says Millward Brown executive vice president of neuroscience practise Graham Page. “By building this technology into our surveys, we can make non-verbal emotional measurement truly scalable and cost effective.”

Founded in 2009 by Professor Rosalind W Picard and Ran el Kaliouby, Affectiva is a spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its aim is to commercialise emotion technology inventions developed at the MIT Media lab, like its facial expression recognition.

David Hing, London