At IGNITE November we have a cutting-edge case study and demonstration of how facial recognition and data science helps BBC Worldwide cultivate content based on users’ emotional response.

What does it take for content to be loved rather than just liked? How do people in different countries react to content?

Creative development relies on engaging audiences on both intellectual and emotional levels. The difficulty is that emotions are messy, complicated, and hard to measure. So how can creative developers really understand how different audiences are going to react to their content? This problem forms a ‘wall of audience disengagement’ – but BBC Worldwide has found a way to break it down.

Mary Kiriakidi, VP Insight for Branded Services and Content at BBC Worldwide, is presenting at IGNITE on the organisation’s new facial recognition tool which allows it to gauge viewers’ responses to content. The micro-SME behind the technology – a company called Crowd Emotion – will also be on hand across the two days to provide a practical demonstration of the tool in our Innovation Uncovered lounge.

Data scientists and creatives can learn to love and lean on each other

Mary’s presentation – on day one of IGNITE, November 4 – will focus on what is the challenge du jour for TV companies: how to develop new data science and research methods to understand emotional engagement with TV shows. For a global operation like the BBC this challenge is greater, but even more necessary.

Mary and her team discovered Crowd Emotion and promptly brought the young company into the fold at the White City offices to help them with this task.

Using webcams, they are now able to capture reactions from people all over the world when they are watching BBC shows, and to then apply machine learning so that they can begin to understand the messy and complicated world of emotions. The findings from the exercise can then be delivered in near real-time, in easy-to-understand visualisations, back to the content creators for iterative improvements and to guide future developments.

It’s a scalable and cost-effective alternative to focus groups and lab-based methods.

But as a creative-led business, the BBC has to be careful about how it uses this insight. How do you boil a rollercoaster of emotions down to a set of graphs and metrics? How do you use such insight to support and empower creative people without stifling and constraining them? How do you ensure that this insight inspires them to continue to boldly innovate, rather than regress to ‘average’ shows that keep ‘average’ people happy?

Attend this session to hear the answers to these questions and more, and to witness firsthand how data science is making a big difference to how the BBC is building brands that connect with different audiences around the world.

 If you are not already attending IGNITE, and you wish confirm your free place, email Zeenat@nimbusninety.com, call 0203 598 2237, or leave your details on our web form.