How Can AI Identify Emotions That Make Up the "Holiday Spirit" in CTV Content? A Q&A With Wurl's Ron Gutman
Ron Gutman, CEO of Wurl, discusses their Gen AI-powered technology that matches CTV ads to the emotion and context of what viewers are watching using Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. They have found that the core emotions that make up the “holiday spirit” are trust and joy. Additionally, they found that holiday channels maintain strong viewership throughout the year, not just during the holiday season, meaning CTV marketers might need to rethink their seasonal strategies. Another finding was that this past October had one of the lowest "holiday spirit"-oriented viewerships, likely due to the US election.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and length).
Tyler Nesler: What I found really interesting is that you're trying to measure emotion, which is, in a sense, measuring qualitative data, and then you're turning into quantitative data. How were “trust and joy” specifically determined to be the primary holiday spirit emotions? What kind of data and insight were gleaned to confirm that these are sort of the baseline emotions of the holiday spirit?
Ron Gutman: Empirically, when we measured the emotions of things that were always involving joy and trust…[it is] family, a calm and safe situation. That's usually what comes together. But when you go deep contextually, it's not just the emotions. We're also looking at the text and objects that are related to the holiday spirit, and we have a confidence level above the threshold. If the content is above the threshold with all the signals that we have for the holiday spirit, then we tag the bid request with the holiday spirit, and advertisers can bid programmatically. That's basically how the ecosystem is set up. So, the emotions are good, but the advertisers want other kinds of packaging, and because we have all this data coming from our AI, we can package it in different ways, and the holiday spirit was one of them.
TN: I thought another really interesting find is that holiday channels maintain strong viewership throughout the year, not just during the holiday season. Do you have any deeper insight into why holiday channels remain relevant to people throughout the year?
RG: I think it goes back to [that] emotions are visceral. You want to [feel] trust and joy if you don't have it. I think that's why people watch TV in general. It's a sort of escapism.
TN: So essentially, it sounds like for holiday channels to remain relevant to people throughout the year, they need to continue to lean into sparking these senses of trust and joy in their viewership.
RG: That's right. And the way that we measure it, AI [can] recognize emotions because it's all trained unsupervised on human text [from] the internet [over] the last 20 years. Basically, the one thing that trains [on AI] very well is emotions because we can't hide them. The text is full of it. Even in 2017 with OpenAI, one of the first things they noticed [is that] it is very easy to detect someone's feelings, and it's well established from reading texts and later on, from analyzing pictures and analyzing music. By the way, because the [music] content is edited so well on television, we found a very high correlation just analyzing the music. We know what emotions people are likely to feel when they watch [programming combined with specific music].
TN: Another surprising discovery is that October is the lowest for holiday viewership, which seems counterintuitive. Was there any insight into why this happens in October in particular?
RG: [In October], people like to watch scary content because we have Halloween. And [this year], you had people under continuous stress about the elections. Some political advertisements were around trust, but many were just [focused on] fear and anger. Anger is really good if you want to push people forward to action, which we had more of in the last two weeks before the election.
TN: With this discovery that year-round holiday channel content viewership is a thing, how can CTV marketers rethink their strategies? I would imagine that there were previously specific seasonal strategies, but now, how can they implement them throughout the year?
RG: Emotions [need to have a good correlation with content and advertising]. This is why CTV, in general, is so good because you have 30 seconds of attention compared to social [with] three seconds, so [on CTV] you can really build up the emotional story. That's how people remember brands and products. If you have this resonance and use the [programming content’s] emotions before the ad break and people are already there, that helps you deliver the message, and we see it empirically [when] measuring the results.
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