We’re entering the season of feelings and emotions, from the scary kind at Halloween to the warm and fuzzy ad campaigns of the holiday season designed to tug at heartstrings.

For brands, these moments are a boon to media performance, brand lift and perception, and purchase consideration. That’s according to Reticle, a Toronto-based techco whose cookieless contextual and emotional AI tool enables media buyers at the programmatic level to access curated digital content through any DSP using a Deal ID.

The technology ingests data, understands it and analyzes it to recognize the emotional signals and emotional sentiment and then places it into one of 19 different emotional categories. Media agencies can then take their creative message and better align it from an emotional perspective. According to Reticle, this type of targeting is shown to spark a 21% increase in ad recall, a 31% lift in attention and 18% improvement in perception. “That means people aren’t just seeing, they are remembering the ad,” said Tricia Allen, VP of business Development at Reticle, in a release.

The technology is based on the map, a human motivation framework created by Reticle’s sister company, Hotspex Insights. Panel research revealed how people think and feel about brands. The millions of data points within that framework were converted into data points that the technology understands as emotion. It understands both semantic cues and sentence structures in addition to images and video to identify with consumer emotions, so an ad not only fits the consumer mindset, it fits how consumers feel.

Allen says that Reticle continues to invest in upgrades and changes to its AI as the tech becomes more sophisticated. It has also improved its YouTube product with a Chrome extension allowing media buyers to automatically upload all of the performance data that previously had to be manually input into an Excel sheet.

Photo by Oxana Melis on Unsplash