The Rise of Emotion AI and Its Surprising Role in Human-Centric Marketing

Emotional intelligence is often cited as AI’s primary weakness, but as marketers, we know that emotion has always played a role in the impact of our campaigns. Now, with the emergence of emotion AI, we are seeing how machine learning elevates human-centric marketing, creating a turning point for marketing ROI.

Marc Fernandez, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Neurologyca Science & Marketing, recently joined OMI’s B2B Influence podcast to share how his company is putting emotion AI into practice. Their technology uses everyday devices—like a laptop or smartphone camera—to read micro-expressions, tone of voice, and other subtle cues to reveal not just what people are feeling, but how those emotions shape their attention and decision-making.

The result: marketers can go beyond clicks and impressions to understand the “why” behind audience behavior and adapt campaigns accordingly.

From Labs to Laptops: Making Emotion AI Accessible

Marc explained that Neurologyca’s journey began a decade ago in Spain as a neuromarketing lab. Over time, they developed proprietary AI models that capture audience insights through standard cameras, making emotion analysis scalable and accessible for brands worldwide. They use their technology to perform testing in natural environments and in real time, whether it’s gauging audience reaction to a video ad on their phone or analyzing engagement with in-store displays. By removing the reliance on self-reported feedback, marketers get unbiased, data-driven emotional profiles.

Real-World Impact: 30–40% Ad Performance Gains

One of Marc's standout examples involves a fintech company testing a series of video ads. Neurologyca's platform detected that one version rose above the others in terms of attention and cognitive clarity—two signals highly correlated with positive brand perception. The flagged ad went on to outperform the others by 30–40% in engagement, leads, and recall.

These kinds of early signals allow marketers to identify high-potential creative before investing heavily in distribution, enabling them to maximize ROI.

Cultural Insights at Scale

Because emotion AI works via standard devices, it can capture data across geographies to reveal cultural differences in emotional response. Marc shared examples from projects where airports and global brands tested how travelers from different countries reacted to content. In one case, ads were dynamically swapped on digital displays until engagement signals rose—ensuring the right message resonated with the right audience, in the right language.

For global B2B marketers, this means campaigns can be tested and optimized across markets without the cost and complexity of in-person focus groups.

Segmenting by Emotional Profile

With our team’s deep expertise in audience building and segmentation, Marc’s insights about using emotion AI to segment prospects by their emotional profile really caught our interest. From our perspective, a well-crafted ideal customer profile (ICP) should form the foundation of every campaign (go here to find out about our no-cost ICP promotion).

Next, using our massive B2B2C database—along with techniques like precision audience-building, B2B2C matching, and intent data—we gather robust insights about our targeted prospects. By doing the heavy lifting up front to deeply understand the audience and segment it effectively, we’re able to realize dramatic improvements in campaign relevance, engagement, and business impact.

Getting back to Neurologyca, from what we've seen, it uses emotion AI to take segmentation to a new level. Our take: layering emotion AI on top of our strategies—to capture the emotions and tones that resonate with target audiences—truly represents a game-changer.

Marc described how Neurologyca worked with a global software company targeting IT managers. Emotion AI revealed two distinct emotional profiles within this seemingly uniform audience—one group responded strongly to reliability messaging, while another connected with aspirational themes of transformation. This insight led to differentiated creative strategies for each group, increasing relevance and impact.

4 Top Takeaways

Looking ahead, Marc predicts that B2B and B2C marketing will become much more emotionally adaptive, with platforms having the capability to adjust tone, pacing, and content in real time based on a viewer’s cognitive and emotional state. Here are four takeaways from the conversation that summarize what emotion AI can do:

1. Revealing the “Why” Behind Engagement – Until recently, emotion has been notoriously hard to measure, especially at scale. Emotion AI changes that by measuring the cognitive and emotional drivers that explain why audiences respond to content the way they do. By using it to capture and interpret real-time emotional and cognitive responses to marketing content, marketers can move beyond clicks and impressions to gain a new level of insight into what truly drives engagement, recall, and conversion.

2. Predicting Performance Early – Signals like attention, cognitive clarity, and positive resonance—detected during the creative process—can flag high-performing content before launch, saving time and budget.

3. Adapting Across Cultures and Contexts – Emotion AI enables real-time adjustments to creative based on audience reaction, whether that’s swapping ads in an airport or fine-tuning a campaign for different cultural markets.

4. Guiding, Not Manipulating, Audiences – Ethical application ensures emotion AI is used to steer content toward relevance and clarity, rather than artificially triggering emotional responses.

Emotion AI brings an entirely new X factor to the power of AI: the nuance of human understanding. This opens the door to content that not only gets seen but also resonates and gets remembered by your target audiences.

Go here to listen to the full podcast episode featuring our conversation with Marc. You can read more about our services and our award-winning B2B2C database here, or reach out to us with questions: request@outwardmedia.com.