Not in the Mood: Why Emotion Prediction Software Will Annoy Many
The New York Times recently pondered the question “What if our gadgets could measure our emotions?” The author acknowledges that this technology is absolutely coming, but I’m left wondering: How can we be sure it’s not already here?
The Times’ Jenna Wortham writes:
Devices and apps can anticipate what we need, sometimes even before we realize it ourselves. So why shouldn’t they understand our feelings? If emotional reactions were measured, they could be valuable data points for better design and development.
“Valuable” doesn’t even begin to describe the worth of customer data and statistics to companies that are developing the software of the future. Mining this data for any information that can increase business isn’t a new concept nor is it limited to only a handful of rare, forward-thinking companies. Charles Duhigg explains in another New York Times story:
Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them.
But as we see the increase of technology that gives retailers the ability to merge the wide range of information that we’ve been providing them for years, Wortham views the quickly approaching horizon of emotional artificial intelligence—also called affective computing—as “intrusive in ways we can’t even fathom today.”
Just because the practice is being widely adopted doesn’t mean it’s not extremely difficult—especially in its relative infancy stage. Cezary Pietrzak, director of marketing at Appboy, recently discussed with Mobile Marketer how mobile device shopping, while obviously providing greater revenue for retailers each year, also creates headaches when trying to predict consumers’ behavior or mood:
First, it allows for brand interactions to happen at any time and any place, so understanding the context of the interaction is more important than ever before. Second, a breed of devices complicate marketing efforts because they introduce more channels to the marketing mix and require a specific type of expertise.
The retail giant Target has been using lighter versions of emotional artificial intelligence for years, using things like public birth records to know when to push offers for baby products to new parents. But to today’s marketers, this isn’t good enough—or, more specifically, early enough. In Target's and other retailers' eyes, why shouldn’t they know you’re expecting a child before the rest of the world knows?
Thanks to affective computing, you may just end up telling Target the exciting news before you tell anyone else.
