Sensum Predicts Audience Vote at Mobile World Congress 2013

By Tracy Dempsey

Sensum co-creator Shane McCourt gave audiences a taste of the future at the world’s largest mobile industry conference in Barcelona last month. Shane was invited to present the Sensum audience insights platform to a 1,000-strong crowd at the “Back to the Future: Mobile Innovation 2023” conference session at Mobile World Congress 2013. During the session, six start-ups pitched for votes as the company having the greatest impact on the global mobile industry over the next ten years. Select audience members used the Sensum platform to measure their emotional response to the pitches to see which were truly winning hearts and minds.

Progress in the field of neuroscience has revealed that humans are essentially emotional decision-makers who rationalise decisions after the fact. Those of you who’ve been following our updates know that the Sensum platform captures that emotional response by measuring tiny changes in audience members’ sweat levels, using galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors worn on the fingers. The sensor units are paired with smartphones or tablets with the Sensum app installed, and the data is then uploaded to a cloud-based dashboard where visualisations show where audience attention peaked or dropped off.

As Shane said, “Mobile World Congress 2013 gave us a fantastic opportunity to carry out testing and increase exposure of the platform. Sensum’s innovative approach to audience testing at the “Back to the Future 2023” session revealed a much deeper understanding of the six company pitches, with the top the companies being Cortexica, Ensygnia and Mobungo. Wearable technology was hailed as a key step change going forward by Peggy Johnson, VP in Qualcomm, at the MWC13 session so it was perfect timing for us to show how we’ve incorporated that into a full mobile solution with a live demonstration.”

Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer of GSMA said “We’re pleased to have had Sensum present as part of our Mobile Innovation session at Mobile World Congress. The use of Sensum’s audience insights platform brought a new element to the session, truly allowing attendees to experience the technology first-hand.”

Helping Shane with the live demo was marketing expert in mobile, Norbert Sagnard, who said, “Since the body never lies, Sensum is bound to display true feelings every time, and without fail, Sensum matched the ‘show of hands’ audience vote on the pitches that day, emphasising its accuracy in assessing the real mood of a group of people”.

Introducing Sensum at their Connected TV spring briefings last year, Channel 4 called it “the most futuristic demo you’ll see today”. Now the futuristic is becoming more mainstream, as broadcasters, brands and media companies embrace wearable technology and affective computing to engage consumers and drive behavioural change. See how Sensum helps people do just that in these videos, which shows our select audience members’ changing engagement levels throughout Cortexica’s winning pitch and that of second-placed Ensygnia.

Runner-up Ensygnia’s CEO and co-founder Richard H. Harris added “It was great to get that immediate, emotional feedback on our presentation. The audience really seemed to ‘get it’ when I demonstrated the OneScan app; it was good to see that reflected and validated by the Sensum platform. It turned that gut reaction into a measurable, positive score”.

To find out more about how Sensum can help you improve your audience engagement, visit us at www.sensum.co.

Sensum Audience Testing Event: Be part of NI Tech History

By Tracy Dempsey

On Monday 25th February, the Sensum team will be at Northern Ireland Science Park giving people the chance to try our innovative emotional response platform as part of a mass audience testing event for a global market research organisation.

Christmas ads - who won audience hearts and minds? The Sensum result

Christmas ads - love’ em or hate ‘em? In a light-hearted look at which supermarket brands were winning over audiences with their seasonal advertisements, we did some sample tests over the festive period. People across the UK put on our Sensum skin sensors and watched ads by ASDA, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. We added some basic survey questions to the Sensum app to gauge participants’ feelings about the brands before and after watching the ad, to add context to the physiological data the sensors capture. 

Here are the results…

MARKS & SPENCER (watch ad here)

The advert overall had a great response with a high engagement throughout and a Sensum score of 55.1 (the Sensum score is an overview of how engaging the advertisement, media, or trailer is). As you can see from the graph, the average response doesn’t really drop throughout the advert:

Pre-viewing

Participants were generally positive about Marks and Spencer, with 50% selecting ‘Positive’ and 19% ‘Very Positive’ in answer to our brand sentiment question. Not one participant selected ‘Negative’ or ‘Very Negative’.  

Of the 70 participants, 81% already shopped at Marks and Spencer, whereas 19% don’t. What’s interesting is that even though this 19% don’t shop at Marks and Spencer’s, they generally have a neutral to positive feeling towards the brand. 

Post-viewing

When asked what they thought of the ad after viewing, the majority of participants selected ‘Good’ (60%) and above (27%). 

Males v. Females (blue = males, green = females)  

After viewing the advert, the ‘Very Positive’ response to the ‘how do you feel about Marks and Spencer’ question increased from 19% to 21%. Only 1% downgraded their feeling towards Marks and Spencer to ‘Negative’. 

The most popular emotional response towards the advert was ‘Joy’ at 30% - which was probably the desired response for a Christmas ad!

Any time a close-up of the actors appeared in the advert, the males’ emotional engagement increased more rapidly and frequently than the females’. 

The males’ engagement near the end of the advert is still fluctuating - especially when the actors come on in their pyjamas! 

The females’ biggest increase is when the advert changes to the scene below with the track “Need You Tonight” by INXS:

Age Comparison (green = 18-24, purple = 35-44)

The engagement of the 18-24-year-olds dropped slowly about halfway through the video, whereas the 35-44-year-olds’ engagement increased until the end of the ad.

TESCO (watch ad here)

Similarly to the Marks and Spencer advert, Tesco’s has quite a good average response with a Sensum score of 52.91. There is, however, a significant increase in the graph just past the halfway point. 

Pre-Viewing

Initially the majority of participants felt neutral (41%) or positive (36%) towards Tesco with 14% negative , 6% very positive and 1% very negative. 

Post-Viewing

A slight majority of the participants thought the advert was good (33%) with positive feelings making up 58% of their responses. Of the remaining 42% who felt less favourably toward the advert, only 3% chose ‘Terrible’. The majority of the participants merely disliked the media, with 29% choosing ‘Not Very Good’. 

Despite the slight majority of favourable reactions to the advert, the most common response of what participants felt after watching the advert was ‘Boredom’, with 33%. 

After the clip there was a slight change in feeling toward Tesco. ‘Very Positive’ responses increased by 3% to 9%, ‘Positive’ responses dropped 5% to 31%, and ‘Neutral’ responses increased by 2% to 43%. The percentage of ‘Negative’ and ‘Very Negative’ responses saw no change. 

Males (grey) v. Females (pink) 

By and large, males and females reacted in much the same way to this clip; their responses following a similar curve with occasional differences. Males were slightly less engaged than their female counterparts throughout - except for when the refrain of Lionel Richie’s “Hello” kicks in. (During our audience test sessions, some of the guys either sang along or mentioned the song after viewing. Seemingly a big hit with the gents!)

Age Comparison (blue = 18-24, beige = 25-34)

Responses of participants in the 18-24 and 25-34 age ranges are reasonably similar. Both age groups are most engaged when the song’s refrain enters, though the 18-24 age group shows slightly more flux and form with some jagged peaks, especially when a shelf of champagne is on screen. 

ASDA (watch ad here)

As with the previous adverts, there is a quite good average response with a Sensum score of 50.79. The graph shows a decreasing level of engagement from start to end. 

Pre-Viewing

Initially, the prevailing feeling amongst the participants was one of neutrality (41%) or of positive feeling toward the brand (34% ‘Positive’, 7% ‘Very Positive’). 13% chose ‘Negative’ and 4% ‘Very Negative’. 56% of viewers already shopped at ASDA, 44% didn’t.

Post-Viewing

Following their viewing of the advert, 69% of the participants reacted favourably, rating the ad as ‘Good’ (39%), ‘Very Good’ (21%) or ‘Excellent’ (9%). 13% selected ‘Not Very Good’, 13% ‘Terrible’, and 6% ‘Not Good At All’.

The majority of positive responses is backed up by the most commonly-identified feeling of ‘Joy’ (26%), with a scattering of mostly favourable or neutral emotions making up the rest.

There was a significant change in feeling towards ASDA after the advert was shown. Neutral or positive reactions to ASDA rose from 69% to 73% after the clip, with an increase of 4% for very positive feelings and 9% for positive feelings while neutral feelings decreased by 22%. However, some of that loss in neutral feelings reflected a change to more negative feelings as the ‘Negative’ response increased by 7% and ‘Very Negative’ by 3%. (This particular ad was discussed a fair bit in the media, with accusations of sexism and a lack of modernity. When we asked people what they thought of the ad, some people (including members of our team) did find it sexist, but many commented that it was true to their own experience of Christmas in the home. It sparked some interesting conversations about the risks brands take - or don’t - in tailoring content for their target demographics.)

Males (light green) v. Females (dark green)

As the clip begins the female participants are more engaged than the males, though this changes around 20 seconds into the advert when males’ engagement increases and the females’ steadily decreases. 57 seconds into the clip both male and female groups then follow the average (orange line) closely with only slight deviation from it. 

Age Comparison: 18-24 (purple) v. 25-34 (red)

The 18-24 year old group started off more engaged than the 25-34 group, which largely followed the average response line (orange) apart from some slight peaks and troughs. By the 25-second mark the 18-24 group gradually decreased in engagement from their high start, with the 25-34 group becoming more engaged. 

SAINSBURY’S (watch ad here)

Like the three previous adverts, Sainsbury’s ad gets a quite good overall response with a Sensum score of 50.76. The graph shows a slight increase in engagement from the start, peaking between 7-8 seconds then decreasing towards the end. 

Pre-Viewing

Sainsbury’s received an impressive 99% neutral to positive rating before the advert was shown, with 53% of that amount in the positive. 

Post-Viewing

Only a slim majority of 55% reacted positively towards the advert, with the most commonly-identified emotion post-viewing being “Boredom”. This resulted in a change of feeling toward the brand itself, namely a 9% decrease in neutral to favourable feeling toward the brand (90%). ‘Very Positive’ and ‘Positive’ responses dropped by 2% and 6% respectively, with no change in neutral opinions and an 8% increase in negative opinions.  

Sainsbury’s Males v. Females

Throughout this clip the male responses (dark grey) and female responses (green) remain close to the average line (orange), with some slight changes.

Age Comparison:18-34 (indigo) v. 25-34 (turquoise)

The 25-34 group’s engagement starts somewhat higher than the average, only to drop significantly around 4 seconds in. Conversely, the 18-24 age range gradually increases in engagement and hits a peak around the same time of 4 seconds into the advert. They then both follow a downward curve in a similar shape to the average with the 18-24-year-olds finishing slightly above the average engagement for the end and the 25-34-year-olds finishing slightly below. 

The Winner…

…is Marks and Spencer, with the highest Sensum score, and a most common response of ‘Joy’ to their advert. It’s interesting to note that the Marks and Spencer ad includes lots of changing scenes and music, keeping the audience engaged throughout, compared to some of the more story-driven ads on offer from their competitors.

This was just a light-hearted test of four of the large supermarket chains operating here in Northern Ireland; but it allowed us to showcase the potential of the Sensum mobile platform for capturing and reporting on in-depth response to media. If you’d like to talk to us about Sensum’s capabilities for audience insights, email info@sensum.co. A massive thank-you to everyone who took part in our tests. Particular thanks to Allstate Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Screen and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, all of whom allowed us to invade their offices to hold audience testing sessions. We appreciated people taking time away from their desks to try Sensum and share their thoughts and ideas - we enjoyed some great conversations! Keep them going at www.facebook.com/sensumco.

Press Release - We’re Launching!

Can’t seem to engage your audience? Don’t sweat it! Sensum launches pioneering audience testing tool 
Tracy Dempsey
January 19th, 2013

Belfast, Northern Ireland – Northern Irish start-up Sensum are set to shake up the way researchers use test screenings to gauge an audience’s engagement with entertainment – with technology that measures tiny changes in viewers’ sweat levels.

Test screenings of TV pilots, feature films or advertisements traditionally involve audience questionnaires, which are by nature subjective. The Sensum emotional response platform adds to these methods with pioneering mobile technology that gives researchers a more in-depth view of audience engagement, whilst protecting viewers’ anonymity.

The Sensum platform measures audience members’ sweat levels using galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors, worn on the fingers, paired with smartphones or tablets which have the Sensum app installed. The data is uploaded to a cloud-based dashboard, where a visualisation shows the points at which the audience’s attention peaked or dropped off.

Gawain Morrison, co-creator of the Sensum platform, explains: “We are entering a new age of natural human computer interfacing and this kind of technology can give entertainment industries a better understanding of audience habits at a time when we are all seeking deeper levels of engagement. Sensors for capturing a range of physiology responses are becoming more widespread; we’ve opted for GSR due to its portability and anonymity for users.”

Over the past few months, the Sensum team has been demoing the capabilities of the platform with members of public as well as media industry insiders. Fans, cast and crew of HBO hit show, Game of Thrones, including storyboard artist Will Simpson and actor Miltos Yerolemou, got to test their reactions to key footage from the show. Oscar-winner Terry George, futurist Gerd Leonhard and Grammy-award winner Imogen Heap also tried out the platform, with Heap nominating her latest music video for Sensum testing during Belfast Music Week. The platform has been fascinating people with the insights its real-time visualisations reveal about their emotional attachment to key characters, scenes and so on.

But Sensum offers much more than just research capabilities. With gamification being an ever-increasing feature of entertainment products, the platform gives content creators the ability to engage with people on a truly emotional level. A viewer’s physiological response to a piece of entertainment could, for example, unlock tailored, bonus content for them.

Morrison has spoken about the future of interactive entertainment and demoed the Sensum prototype at various media and technology events worldwide. At the TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco, he joined Intel Research and Microsoft Kinect on a panel discussing “Natural Human Computer Interfacing for Future Entertainment”. Introducing the Sensum prototype at their Connected TV spring briefings, Channel 4 called Sensum “the most futuristic demo you’ll see today”. Now the futuristic is becoming more mainstream, as broadcasters, brands and media companies embrace wearable technology and affective computing to engage consumers and drive behavioural change. With the launch of the new Sensum platform, its creators are now ready to work with innovative partners interested in the bigger picture.

ENDS-

Notes to Editors:

Find out more about Sensum at www.sensum.co or follow @sensumco on Twitter.

To arrange an interview with Gawain Morrison, contact: +44 (0)28 95811818/ +44 (0)7901 910069, gawain@sensum.co

Press contact: Tracy Dempsey, +44 (0)7740 509159, tracy@sensum.co

A zip file containing various formats of the Sensum logo can be downloaded from http://www.sensum.co/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/SensumLogo.zip

The results of the Imogen Heap music video test event can be viewed at http://sensumco.tumblr.com/post/37067556175/imogen-heap-sensum-emotional-response-audience

The Sensum platform can even use the real-time, physiological reactions of an audience to change the entertainment being watched. At SXSW last year, Morrison debuted an interactive short horror film, Unsound, which responded to the audience’s emotional engagement, as measured by their sweat levels and pulse rate, by changing camera angles and soundscapes to intensify the experience. Read a New Scientist article on Unsound at http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/05/gamify-your-sweat-and-make-fil.html

Imogen Heap/Sensum ‘emotional response’ audience testing event

By Tracy Dempsey

Following our recent audience testing event for the launch of Muse’s the 2nd Law album, where we measured people’s emotional response to audio tracks, we wanted to take things further and explore people’s engagement with music videos. We approached Imogen Heap with the idea, given the level of access she gives her fans in her creative practice, and her love of pushing boundaries in sound and technology. As hoped, Imogen was intrigued and asked us to carry out some audience testing of her latest video, You Know Where To Find Me, during Belfast Music Week. Below are the results, along with Imogen’s thoughts on it all - let us know yours in the comments below!

The results

Bearing in mind that the exercise wasn’t carried out under lab conditions, we got a pretty consistent result from participants. Our sample group of around 20 included males and females of different age ranges, fans and industry professionals.

For any of you new to the Sensum emotional response platform, it adds to traditional feedback (via questionnaires) with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors to measure people’s skin conductance (sweat levels), which tells us their level of arousal in response to a piece of audio/video. Any increase or decrease in arousal could be due to positive or negative responses; excitement or fear, relaxation or boredom, and so on, so we used post-viewing questions and the Plutchik Wheel of Emotions to further investigate people’s responses.

For the You Know Where To Find Me video, we saw in most people’s emotional response a gradual increase in skin resistance - i.e. decrease in arousal - as the video progressed, with spikes of arousal at points where something changed (key changes, for example, or the re-introduction of vocals after an instrumental section). In the screen grab below you can see the early key change triggered an increase in arousal/sweat levels which shows as a decrease in resistance on the graph. For our upcoming beta launch we’re going to reverse the direction of the graph to make it more intuitive.)

Post-viewing, most people chose ‘serenity’ on the Plutchik Wheel to describe their feeling - i.e. the decrease in arousal we were capturing was a result of them becoming more chilled out as the track/video progressed. When we shared this with Imogen, she replied, “Interesting results from Sensum regarding my song. Would be very curious to see the difference in results after having told the story behind the video to the song.” Indeed, two people told us that for them the video actually detracted from their enjoyment of the music - but when the background to the video was later explained, they became more interested.

The screen grab below shows a listener’s gradually increasing resistance - decrease in arousal - over the length of the track; this was a typical response as noted.

We also tested people’s emotional response to some of Imogen’s other videos, for comparison. The ‘serenity’ response came back again for Canvas, ‘surprise’ for First Train Home. Most people either liked the track slightly more than the video or liked both equally (aside from the two already mentioned who found the video a negative distraction from an enjoyable track), with a most common score of 8/10 across our sample group for both video and audio.

However, fascinating as it is to explore people’s emotional response to music, we’re especially interested in the idea of emotional response as a trigger. The Sensum platform was born out of a multi-disciplinary project called Biosuite, which the Sensum team ran in conjunction with the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. As part of this project, which combined film production, music composition, environmental art, technology, and engineering to research audience interactivity and immersion in the audiovisual experience, an interactive horror short Unsound was created, where the audience’s aggregate emotional response triggered changes in the soundscape, camera angles and so on. (Read this New Scientist feature about it.)

Imogen’s “The Gloves” project uses gestural, motion data capture technology both as instrument and controller, so she was greatly interested in the potential of Sensum for real-time musical creation. She told us, “This has sparked my imagination to wonder what music I could write/play live that would be influenced, directed or conducted by the audience response in real time. Would love to see a film created live in this way too as I believe Sensum have been experimenting with.

“Imagining personal computers of the future via constant background emotional response reading and identifying their owner’s musical tastes so well as to be able to make on the spot music to accompany any mood or task. To inspire, calm down, excite, motivate. A whole new genre or area of music. Real computer music!”

A massive thank-you to Imogen for getting involved, and to all who took part in our testing. Thanks also to the staff at Harlem Cafe Belfast and the Belfast Music Week team for letting us do some guerilla testing during an industry event. See photos at www.facebook.com/sensumco, and find out more about the platform at www.sensum.co.

Are you a musician, music industry professional or music fan? What do you think of this technology and how it might change the craft, or our experience of music?

Sensum at the MAC for the 15 Second Film Festival

On the 23^rd of October, Sensum staff visited the Metropolitan Art Centre in Belfast to test their emotions with the Sensum mobile emotional response platform to the 15 Second Film Festival showreel. 

The 15 Second Film Festival, featuring ‘The Mini Mogul’ Cinema: A unique 2-Seater Art Deco Picture Palace, commissions, exhibits and distributes micro-short films, collating these in a series of six minute or so reels. It was something a little different for us to test ourselves to at Sensum. 

As the visualisation of my results begin, the graph starts off low indicating I was engaged from the start of the showreel. I think this was down to the novelty of sitting in a secluded photo-booth size cinema and not knowing what was to come next.

Though the graph continues to rise, suggesting that I’d lost engagement with the audio/visual stimulus I was enjoying the show reel and felt attentive to what was on-screen. This would then mean that having relaxed into the flow of the reel, with the comfortable chair and lack of distractions my autonomic nervous system (flight or fight response) had been overridden. You can still see small peaks and troughs on the graph as I respond to onscreen events, usually at the end of each fifteen second film which often involved some startling resolution.

As my level of relaxation is established, you can see that the graph has plateaued.

My level of relaxation then remains steady until the end. 

Again, this level of relaxation doesn’t conform to my being un-engaged as I enjoyed the show-reel until the end and felt focused on the various story-lines of the films. Knowing how I felt at the time is important in getting a greater understanding of my emotional response in relation to the graph visualisation of my galvanic skin response (sweat levels) data. 

The new Sensum Beta introduces a questionnaire with responses that are cross referenced with the graphic visualisation to have all that information in one place. 

We’d like to thank Fran Cavanagh and Samantha Porciello at the MAC as well as Peter ‘Magic’ Johnson of the Fifteen Second Film festival for their support in allowing us to test at the MAC with the Fifteen Second Film Festival show-reel.

Phil