Today was day three of the ‘Marketing… Beyond 2020’ festival at the university of Derby. This was the second day of guest lectures and we had two guest speakers come in who discussed AI and facial expressions which was really interesting. If you haven’t yet read my summary from day one, then be sure to check it out.
Artificial Intellegence
Our first guest speaker of the day was Matt King who works at Mintel. Mintel is a market research and market insights company who explore and research current trends in the market. Matt came in today to talk about a trend that is becoming of increasing importance and influence, artificial intelligence. An interesting fact he provided was that there has been a 15x increase in venture capital investment into AI in the last five years which just goes to show how massive it is becoming recently.
In his talk he gave examples of AI including chat bots, voice assistants, visual search and recommended products such as the suggestions you get on Netflix or Amazon. The more you use the service, the better the AI understands your purchasing/watching habits. Therefore, the better, more relevant results it can show you.
What does this mean for brands?
Matt then went on to talk about the implications of this increase in popularity. For brands and businesses, it will become increasingly important to establish an early presence on these voice platforms. As growth in AI is anticipated, so is a growth in direct purchasing using these platforms.
Additionally, as AI increases, so will the influence it plays on the brands that we buy. For example, digital assistants will begin helping us with our purchase decisions. However, with this comes the need for companies to be respectful of people’s data concerns. We need to make sure not to use AI to the point where it becomes creepy.
Facial Expressions
Our second guest speaker of the day was Adrianna Carter, aka the ‘face whisperer’. Adrianna came in to talk about the ‘facial action coding system’ and how we can use this to create better images for advertising campaigns.
One of the first things she spoke about was how obvious emotions are. She explained that emotions take over 24x faster than rational thought. They come so naturally to us that they are often hard to disguise. She actually spoke about how lots of research has been done into people whom are blind and if their facial expressions are the same as ours. The research showed that people who are born blind, still showed the same facial expressions despite having never seen someone else do it. For example, blind Paralympians who still look ecstatic when they have won a race.
With this innate ability to expression emotions, comes the ability to recognise them too, often subconsciously. As a result, Adrianne explains the need for genuine emotions to be conveyed in imagery and branding. For example, fake smiles and fake happiness is often detected and confused with disgust. This can influence a consumers purchase decisions.
Another interesting point was what personal photos we are using and what they portray about us. An example given about this was your LinkedIn profile picture. Do you look disgusted or contempt in your profile picture? Something definitely worth considering.
Overall I think day 3 was also really interesting and I learnt a lot about things that aren’t covered in my course content which I really enjoyed. I would love to know your thoughts on the talks I spoke about today. Let me know in the comments below and I hope you have a great day.
