Vevo’s new Moods feature serves ads based on viewers’ emotions

Global music video network Vevo has launched a new playlist service called Moods, which uses artificial intelligence to group music videos according to their moods, allowing advertisers to more effectively target their audience.

The selling point is brands would be more assured that their ads align with viewers’ mindsets in a ‘romantic’ playlist of music videos just before Valentine’s Day or a ‘heartfelt’ playlist on Mother’s Day. As the New York-based company explained, this boosts ad recall and brand favourability.

At this week’s launch, ‘fun’, ‘heartfelt’, ‘impassioned’ and ‘empowering’ moods were available. Additional moods and features in development will be rolled out over the coming months.

“With Moods, we can not only curate Vevo programming to better match a person’s mood, but we can also directly ensure advertisers that their campaigns are more meaningful and impactful in the same way that we guarantee a high-quality, brand-safe environment,” said Kevin McGurn, Vevo's president of sales and distribution.

“Therefore, it’s the logical step that we have synergy between the ad creative and the mood it evokes with the music video it surrounds.”

Vevo worked with music data and lyrics company Musixmatch, to score and label videos based on the energy and tone of each song. A proprietary model built by Musixmatch then assigns a mood to each Vevo video’s metadata tag for targeting.

Eyal Golshani, Vevo’s senior director of data science, added: “Our moods affect everything that we do, including the content we consume and the ads we engage with. From joy to fear, sadness to hope, music videos have remained a constant source of comfort and soundtrack our everyday lives.

“With our innovative data-based capabilities, Vevo can better understand our viewers, and their frame of mind while viewing, to deliver the best music video experience. Simultaneously, by developing new offerings like Moods, we continue to add value to artists and advertisers alike, helping them achieve their respective goals through data science.”

Vevo claims over a billion monthly active users around the world – 10 million in Australia at the end of 2020 – and 26 billion views a month for its 450,000 music videos. It is primarily owned by major record labels, and available across most ad-based online video platforms. In Australia, it came to Telstra TV last September.