LONDON — In the rise of programmatic advertising’s “Maths Men“, the ad industry is overlooking the importance of creatives that turn on real emotions, says a viral video expert.

Social media video agency Unruly Media has been building a data set quantifying the emotional response characteristics to video rather than categorizing responses by demographic fields, according to EMEA MD Phil Townend.

“If you’re looking at consumer engagement, the art of sharing is probably a much better number to look at than how many views a piece of content has got,” Townend says.

“Programmatic is quite two-dimensional at the moment – it looks at buckets of audience segments based on what they’ve done, who they are, what their demograph is. if you overlay emotion and content characteristics into programmatic, you can say ‘this segment will react much better to content that has these characteristics and they’ll do it between 9am and 10am in the morning on the move on their mobile phone.

“Humanizing programmatic and adding a whole new dimension to it, you can turbocharge the whole thing.”

This video was recorded  at the Beet.TV programmatic video leadership summit sponsored by Videology, hosted by Xaxis at the London offices of GroupM.