Millward Brown Clients Back Facial Coding

Millward Brown has announced a major expansion of its Link and Facial Coding technology, and says two of its biggest clients, Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company, will use the technique for all their ad testing in 2013.

Kantar / WPP subsidiary MB has a dedicated Neuroscience Practice headed up by Graham Page (pictured) and using the Affdex Facial Coding software developed by MIT Media Lab spin-off Affectiva. MB says the technology has already been used on over 400 advertising research projects in more than 40 countries around the world, and is thereby 'the world's most widely used non-verbal advertising research system'. With the addition of the two major clients and others, it expects to run 'thousands' of emotional measurement projects this year.

Unilever will apply facial coding to all quant ad pre-testing projects worldwide, while Coca Cola will use facial coding in their Link research for animatic advertising.

Affdex is now being 'seamlessly' integrated with Millward Brown's Link copy-testing solution, recording respondents' faces while they watch ads within a normal survey environment and automatically interpreting their emotional and cognitive states at each moment. Results are analysed against survey responses and delivered within an online dashboard.

Page says of the latest development: 'We're really excited that two of our most forward-thinking clients have chosen to use this leading edge technology at scale. The combination of direct observation of physical responses and viewers' interpretation of their reactions provides a really powerful view of the way people respond to advertising.'

The global agency is online at www.millwardbrown.com .