Agency Uses Truth To Market Product That Is Nothing But

Debates over the truthfulness of advertising may continue for, well, ad infinitum, but WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather unit is using advertising to market a product that can tell when people aren’t telling the truth. In a campaign breaking this week for Tokyo-based toymaker TOMY, O&M Japan literally shows people being caught in the act of lying -- or not.

The video campaign features man-on-the-street reactions to people wearing the Coroco Scanner, a device that can detect when people are lying. When worn on the head, the device senses stress levels indicating the donner's mood expressed as blinking red, yellow and green lights that can indicate whether they are telling the truth.

The product is more than just a modern day mood ring. It’s one of the first mass consumer marketed products to utilize advances in biometric technologies that can determine people’s emotional signals, including their unconscious feelings.

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Last year, Interpublic Mediabrands’ IPG Media Lab deployed a new software platform developed with New York-based tech start-up IMRSV that can read consumers’ facial expressions to determine their emotions when looking at ads or products in public spaces, including retail locations.

Now, O&M and client TOMY are bringing a similar principle directly to the consumer marketplace.

While donning a Coroco Scanner, O&M Japan President Akihiko Kubo quipped that the technology may also have industrial applications within ad agencies.

“From now on, I will demand that all the Directors in the agency wear the Cocoro Scanner at our monthly board meeting,” he said, according to a statement in the agency’s release, which also noted that the device “blinked green.”

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