Mood Marketing?

Ad targeting is the key to getting your product or service in front of your core demographic and successfully driving qualified traffic to your website. It’s also a factor that makes online advertising more attractive than print and other advertising mediums. Currently, we have many targeting methods, including demographic, geographic, behavioral, and contextual, and many of these targeting strategies are now being used together, like geographic and behavioral, to send the right message at the right time to the right consumer base. What if marketers could also target users based on their current mood? Given status updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, it won’t be long before these updates are crawled to determine emotional states and tone inflections.

Something similar is being performed through such sites as Moodagent and another handful of music sites that select a playlist based on your chosen mood. Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon and you’ve selected ‘I Gotta Feelin’ by The Black Eyed Peas. This would be a great opportunity for Specs, Yellow Cab, and Taco Cabana to all run ads, maybe even coupon ads, for listeners of a song / station about living it up and having a good night on the town.

Emotion-based advertising is an additional opportunity to further engage consumers, wherein a brand matches their values to the emotions of their core audience. According to the creator of Moodagent, Peter Berg Steffensen, CEO of Syntonetic, “through our deeper understanding of the intrinsic link between music and mood, we empower powerful and emotional connections between brands and their fans.”

Personally, I’m still impressed with the ever-timely weather-based advertising so I think mood targeting is a stretch and will require a great deal of tweaking before perfected. But speaking of forecasting, what will be next? A mouse that can read palms and determine what ads to deliver based on your character or future life? Stay tuned!