This is an ad for the 2018 Camry that Toyota published on Twitter.
They also published this one.
And this one.
For this one campaign, Toyota released 83 different versions of the same ad, and every
version targeted different users -- not based on their gender or their age, their political
affiliation or their location.
The ads targeted users' emotional states through their emojis.
A targeted ad is where a company shows their ads to only certain kinds of people, certain
people who are more likely to buy their products or like their message.
That’s why as someone who creates videos just like this one, I see ads for Adobe’s
video-making products in my Facebook feed.
But in 2016, Twitter began giving advertisers access to emoji data like who is posting what
and when and which emojis are the most popular.
That is totally unique compared to advertising before this.
Emojis have an emotional context paired with them and that lets advertisers better gauge
the feelings expressed in people's tweets.
With emoji targeting, every highly tailored ad would be triggered by the emojis a user
would post, in real time.
Tweet a pizza emoji and Domino's would reply with a coupon.
Tweet any emoji at Google and get a handy link for the top search results on their platform.
Tweeted a heart eye emoji today?
Well, Toyota might determine that you're feeling positive and serve you this ad while you're
in that feel good mood.
Some emojis are pretty obvious right.
Smiley face, I’m happy.
Frowny face, I'm sad.
But you know there's a bunch of emoji which are much more -- the line's much more fine
between what that person is actually feeling or thinking at the time.
For those emojis that express more ambiguous emotions, advertisers can use artificial intelligence
to predict if an emotion is used in a positive negative or neutral context.
Let's look at Toyota again.
In January of 2017, Donald Trump tweeted a major criticism of the company for planning
to build a plant in Mexico.
After that tweet was posted, the number of social media posts about the automaker spiked.
But if you look at this chart, you can see how people felt about Toyota not just how
much they talked about it.
Right after Trump's comments, the percent of negative posts spiked when compared to
positive posts about the company.
For an advertiser, knowing how people are feeling is immensely valuable, and they can
target consumers with positive feelings and avoid those with more negative ones.
Emojis are just one more tool for advertisers to assess people's emotions.
The idea is that if the advertisers are using it effectively going to see more relevant ads.
But regardless of how relevant those ads are, the process is never going to be
fully transparent.
As a consumer it's difficult if not almost impossible to tell what information a marketer
is using to target you.
Most advertisers argue that tracking the emojis you use is no different than tracking the
keywords you use on Google, because you volunteered that information publicly.
You shared that data freely with a free website that is ad supported, you should be able to
understand that the same type of thing is going to happen on a social media platform.
But consumer advocacy groups disagree.
They argue that advertising to people based on a psychological profile of their
emotions is intrusive.
About half of Americans share a similar skepticism, many of whom aren't
confident that social media sites actually protect their data.
And emojis are part of that data.
For all the privacy concerns, emoji advertising is still in its infancy and though it only
exists right now on Twitter, it wouldn't be a far leap to see multiple platforms offer
a similar service in the future.
And in the best case, we may get ads that give you immediate and valuable information.
Maybe you'll post an eggplant emoji and Durex will send you a condom emoji with 10 percent
off your next purchase.
Or if you don't like your emoji data being used, maybe you just don't use emojis.
Yeah, right.