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

Mixed Reality to Become Mainstream

For all of its impressive effects, marketers have been holding back to some extent from applying mixed reality to their campaigns. That made sense in light of the fact that most people were not equipped to view it properly. But that's set to change by the end of this year.

At the end of August, Microsoft announced a lineup of mixed reality equipment for the holiday season that is expected to put it in the hands of a lot more people, thanks to the triple appeal of an affordable price, easy setup, and portability...

Google just released  a preview of its new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore for Android devices. Here's a video showing some Wizard of Oz inspired effects:

Popular characters also be adapted to marketing in a mixed reality environment, for example letting people interact with personae linked to brands, like Tony the Tiger, or Mr. Clean. That would mean that anyone could have the experience shown in cleaner's Super Bowl ad last year (except for getting the actual cleaning done, of course).

Read more in Mainstreaming Mixed Reality

Enhancing engagement with RCS

Rich Communications Services (RCS) effectively “drives engagement,” Brian Heikes, Vice President Product, Solutions and Analytics at 3Cinteractive says, because it makes it possible for people to experience “the same richness” provided by OTT “with the ubiquity that SMS has.” That opens up possibility of custom branding and other rich media used with native messenger.

In effect, it can offer “the depths of capabilities that have been locked behind an application” within “the messaging experience.” That's a significant benefit in light of the fact that “more than 95%” of people who download apps quit using them after just 30 days. As a result, brands can't capitalize on the promise of app engagement with the “ubiquitous capability” enjoyed by SMS.

At the 2017 Mobile World Congress, 3C showcased some of the possible applications RCS, with an illustration from its client, Walgreens, and Early Access Program partner, Google. This video, shows how Walgreens gives consumers personalized beauty recommendations seamlessly by uploading a selfie.

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RCS To Set a New Standard for Mobile Marketing