Sticky now tracks eyes and emotions to guide your ad campaign

What Sticky’s software sees through panel members’ webcams.

Brands can now get a Sticky AdVantage over their competitors, thanks to a new solution by that name announced this week by eye-tracking and emotion measurement platform Sticky.

The San Francisco-based firm has had an emotion-tracking service called AdEmotion, which followed users’ eye movements and detected emotions via facial expressions in response to video ads.

Its emotional detection — which is conducted only for video ads, since static and short moving ads rarely produce emotions — looks for expressions depicting Fear, Happiness, Disgust, Neutral, Puzzlement, Sadness and Surprise. Here’s a sample emotion-tracking screen:

While the new AdVantage similarly employs panels of paid and consenting online viewers using their webcams and computers, it takes the process a few steps further.

AdVantage goes beyond video ads to include HTML5 ads of all types, static ads and animated GIFs. It can also test an ad on an actual page, while AdEmotion could only test video ads standing alone.

But the biggest difference is that AdVantage is intended to offer guidance on campaigns, rather than just feedback on individual ads. It allows a brand to test one creative against another, which can mean one part of an ad against another, such as different logo treatments. Based on this feedback, Sticky will make recommendations about which ads to choose for specific kinds of campaigns. Here’s a screen with recommendations:

Sticky AdVantage also offers two new metrics: Time Engaged, or “gaze time” looking directly at the ad, and Percent Seen, which quantifies how much of the ad is actually looked at.

The company contends that “time spent looking at an ad” drives conversion. It notes that ads meeting the Media Rating Council’s viewability standard (50 percent of an ad visible for at least one second) are actually seen by only six percent of viewers, according to its research.

Overall, Sticky said, AdVantage can often generate 5x better better recall than campaigns not supported by eye-tracking and emotional detection.

Chief Business Officer Nitin Gupta told me the fully automated AdVantage service is the only eye-tracking and emotional detection service that recommends which content is better for a given campaign.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.