Mood Marketing Drives Toyota's Latest Campaign

The calendar still says 2017, but for car brands, it's already 2018. To market  this year's Camry, Toyota is veering away from making its car look like the sensible, though boring choice. Its “Sensations” campaign is meant to tap into what its audience is feeling.

Among the commercials designed for the campaign are some that explicitly encourage making the purchase of the care for “the wrong reasons.”  Those present the Camry as an attractive choice that makes driving a sensuous experience – as if the car were a sexy sports car.

As you can see from the video above, “Striking” presents a young woman in the role of the Bond girl, who zooms by in a car that flutters her hair as if she were in a convertible with the top down. It meant to be exciting, and once y're excited you can find a corresponding video identified by emoji.

Read more in Toyota Turns to Twitter for Mood Marketing

Got sarcasm?

I'm being sarcastic." We've all had at least one exchange in which we either had to explain or had someone else explain that what was said was not intended to be taken straight. Generally, you need to know something about both the context and the speaker to grasp when to take a statement at face value or interpret it as sarcastic.

That's why it's particularly challenging to get handle on intent when attempting sentiment analytics on social media. For artificial intelligence to truly understand what humans mean, it needs emotional intelligence, as well. Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor the MIT Media lab and one of his students, who developed the algorithm with one of, Bjarke Felbo worked on just that.

The results are what they call Deep Moji. Described as "artificial emotional intelligence," Deep Moji was trained on millions of emojis "to understand emotions and sarcasm." Rahwan explained to MIT's Technology Review that in the context of online communication emojis take on the function of body language or tone in offering nonverbal cues for meaning.

Read more in Emojis Train AI to Recognize Sarcasm