Why advertisers are tracking your emojis 😱

Key Takeaways

[Music] this is an ad for the 2018 Camry that Toyota published on Twitter they also published this one and this one for this one campaign Toyota released 83 different versions of the same ad and every version targeted different users not based on their gender or their age their political affiliation or their location the ads targeted users emotional states through their emojis a [Music] targeted ad is where a company shows their ads to only certain kinds of people certain people who are more likely to buy their products or like their message that's why is someone who creates videos just like this one I see ads for Adobe's video making products in my Facebook feed but in 2016 Twitter began giving advertisers access to emoji data like who is posting what and when and which emojis are the most popular that is totally unique compared to advertising before this emojis have an emotional context paired with them and that lets advertisers better gauge the feelings expressed in people's tweets with emoji targeting every highly tailored ad would be triggered by the emojis a user would post in real-time tweet a pizza emoji and Domino's would reply with a coupon tweet any emoji at Google and get a handy link for the top search results on their platform tweet at a heart i emoji today well Toyota might determined that you're feeling positive and serve you this ad while you're in that feel-good mood some emojis are pretty obvious right smiley face I'm happy frowny face I'm sad but you know there's a bunch of emoji which are much more the lines much more fine between what that person is actually feeling or thinking at the time for those emojis that express more ambiguous emotions advertisers can use artificial intelligence to predict if an emoji is used in a positive negative or neutral context let's look at Toyota again in January of 2017 Donald Trump tweeted a major criticism of the company for planning to build a plant in Mexico after that tweet was posted the number of social media posts about the automaker spiked but if you look at this chart you can see how people felt about Toyota not just how much they talked about it right after Trump's comments the percent of negative posts spiked when compared to positive posts about the company for an advertiser knowing how people are feeling is immensely valuable and they can target consumers with positive feelings and avoid those with more negative ones emojis are just one more tool for advertisers to assess people's emotions the idea is that if the advertisers are using it effectively you're going to see more relevant ads but regardless of how relevant those ads are the process is never going to be fully transparent as a consumer it's difficult if not almost impossible to tell what information a marketer is using to target you most advertisers argue that tracking the emojis you use is no different than tracking the keywords you use on Google because you volunteered that information publicly you shared that data freely with a free website that is ad supported you should be able to understand that the same type of thing is going to happen on a social media platform but consumer advocacy groups disagree they argue that advertising to people based on a psychological profile of their emotions is intrusive about half of Americans share a similar skepticism many of whom aren't confident that social media sites actually protect their data and emojis are part of that data for all the privacy concerns emoji advertising is still in its infancy and though it only exists right now on Twitter it wouldn't be a far leak to see multiple platforms offer a similar service in the future and in the best case we may get ads that give you immediate and valuable information maybe you'll post an eggplant emoji and Durex will send you a condom emoji with 10% off your next purchase or if you don't like your emoji data being used maybe you just don't use emojis Yeah right you