Wunderman Thompson has unveiled a new artificial intelligence testing tool for advertising and other brand assets. 

The test platform, known as Reveal, was developed in-house to measure audience attention and emotional responses to brand content through real-world environments, via PCs and phones. 

Using volunteer panels of target audience participants, the platform observes reactions, micro-expressions, and changes in muscle movement in the face — unconscious emotional responses that the agency says, “show genuine emotional responses which are involuntary and authentic.”  

The technology can detect seven emotions including anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, surprise. 

With the new tool, brands can track second-by-second when the viewer is “paying attention, getting immersed in the story, and forming emotional connections,” the agency asserts. 

The upshot: brands can test different video edits, headlines, images, copy and more to understand what works best for the target audience.  

The agency stresses that the process is “consent based” and no personal data is stored “beyond the time required for analysis.” 

David Lloyd, managing director of data, EMEA at Wunderman Thompson, says Reveal “is a game changer for creative testing. Not only because it allows brands to test a larger audience, faster, and more cost-effectively than traditional methods, but it also delivers a far richer understanding of how to improve the creative performance of branded content, based on the data and insights collected.”   

The tool is the latest AI-based offering in a suite of capabilities from the agency. It recently launched a scalable content quality assurance platform dubbed Brand Guardian. Another new platform, called ShelfMaster helps brands adapt their content to multiple channels.

A separate offering called Loom mixes audience, content and performance data to sharpen content planning and strategies.