GfK has integrated EMO Scan, its award-winning biometric measure of emotional response, into its market-validated ad testing system. Available globally, EMO Scan gains consumers’ permission to use their own webcams, to track their facial movement in real time as they view advertising.

“Our system is unique because it reads peoples’ authentic emotional response to advertising using an exposure environment that is not forced” says Nathalie Mandavit, Global Director of GfK Communication Efficiency. “A low involvement viewing experience is absolutely essential, to capture people’s spontaneous reactions to the advertising creative, unaffected by influences from an artificial environment. This means that we can deliver outstanding sensitivity in our measure of emotional response – which, when fully integrated with a person’s claimed emotions towards an ad, significantly boosts our clients’ success in optimizing their advertising creative.”

GfK is currently expanding the EMO Scan platform, adding new measures for recognizing human emotions and covering additional research applications.

EMO Scan won the 2012 Innovation Prize from the BVM, a German association for market and social research. It is the commercial outcome of an ongoing scientific and technical collaboration between GfK Verein, GfK SE, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) and CISA – the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva, headed by Professor Klaus R. Scherer, Professor of Psychology.

To find out more, visit www.gfk.com or follow GfK on Twitter: www.twitter.com/gfk_en