At StreamTV Live, Wurl's Scott Dahlgren introduced BrandDiscovery, a new AI-powered tool that’s reshaping how advertisers connect with viewers on streaming platforms. Rather than relying solely on traditional content categories, Wurl analyzes billions of hours of FAST TV content to score scenes for emotional tone—then matches ads to scenes based on that emotional profile. The result: viewers see ads that better fit the mood of the content they’re watching, leading to stronger engagement.
Built on psychologist Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, BrandDiscovery identifies eight core emotions—such as joy, sadness, and anger—at three levels of intensity. This allows for 24 emotional states to target ads more precisely. Dahlgren notes that the results are already promising: case studies across verticals like QSR, retail, and public health have all shown increases in key metrics, from brand favorability to search volume. This next phase of contextual advertising—scene-level emotional targeting—is giving brands new ways to create meaningful moments with audiences across streaming environments.
David Bloom:
Hi, I am David Bloom. Next TMT. I'm here with my colleague, Dan Frankel, also from Next TMT at the StreamTV Live show. We are talking with Scott Dahlgren, the senior business development lead for brands and agencies with Wurl. So Scott, I guess to start, Wurl's been around for a while. I think it's pretty well known, but tell us just real quickly, a tiny bit about what Wurl is for those who don't somehow know.
Scott Dahlgren:
Sure. Yeah. Wurl's an ad tech company that's been around for about a decade now, and one of their primary functions is to help content companies who want to make the jump from cable to streaming do so. So those content companies would upload their content and assets onto Wurl's platform and we would help enable them monetize and distribute that content via a fast channel, or what we call a free ad-supported streaming TV channel.
David Bloom:
But it's new content, and effectively it's old content that was built for a different kind of ad experience, right?
Scott Dahlgren:
That's right. These are people traditionally in the cable arena who want to get into the free ad-supported streaming TV world, and the streaming is definitely different than cable, and so we help facilitate that monetization and distribution of streaming.
Dan Frankel:
Speaking of new types of advertising, I think back to my childhood, my traumatic childhood where I'd watch-
David Bloom:
Where they had all kinds of new advertising. So, just to clarify.
Dan Frankel:
I would watch scary movies on Friday nights. My mom would let me stay up late, and you'd get really freaked out. Then all of a sudden there'd be Cal Worthington at his dog spot, famous California car salesman would advertise late at night. It was jarring. I was really scared, and all of a sudden Cal Worthington's riding an elephant. I'm told in terms of engagement-
David Bloom:
But it was a zombie elephant. That was the key.
Dan Frankel:
... brand connection. Emotion, Dave. Maybe you know something about that, but that's not optimal, and you have a new product called BrandDiscovery that's AI based that solves that problem.
Scott Dahlgren:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I remember Go See Cal as well. So I may be dating myself a little bit.
Dan Frankel:
Iconic.
Scott Dahlgren:
Iconic. But we do have a new product called BrandDiscovery, and essentially what we do is we are scanning all of the billions of hours of content that lives on our platform, and we are testing it and scoring it for things like brand safety for things like genre, and then most importantly for the emotional responses that each of the scenes before the ad break invokes. And based on those emotional responses, we will then pair them up with an advertiser who has a similar type of creative. So very simply, a joyful creative would meet a person who's watching joyful content.
David Bloom:
But if you're watching the Saturday Night Horror movie, it might be like the seller of fake blood, for instance?
Scott Dahlgren:
Yes, exactly. Right.
David Bloom:
I'm just trying to think about what would be a good fit. I think it's really interesting. So what's the range of emotions that you match against? I mean, how many colors are in that rainbow?
Scott Dahlgren:
That's an interesting question. So we base our taxonomy on a famous psychologist named Robert Plutchik, and he had something called the Wheel of Emotions. And so the outer wheel of these emotions were essentially eight primary emotions. Joy, sadness, anger. And so basically we are able to target those eight primary emotions at three different frequencies.
So for example, anger at a highest frequency, might be rage, for example. So by being able to target those eight primary emotions at three different intensities, it essentially gives us 24 different emotional targeting variables to work with. So quite a bit.
Dan Frankel:
So you've tested this with some agency clients so far, right?
Scott Dahlgren:
We have. We've worked with a number of different categories from QSR to retail. We just finished one with a state health council about changing hearts and minds for healthy behaviors. We should have a case study for that one coming soon. So we've worked with a number of brands across verticals, and I have to say, so far in all of the case studies we've run, we've seen a market increase in response, whether that was driving somebody into a retail establishment, whether that was increasing search results, whether that was increasing things like brand favorability or intent. In every instance thus far, we've seen emotions really perform well.
David Bloom:
It's really interesting to think about because it feels like contextual advertising, emotion-based stuff is where everything is running to now. We had an era there and now we're entering a new era of advertising. Is that safe to say?
Scott Dahlgren:
I think that's a fair assessment. I think Contextual Targeting 1.0 was, "Hey, we want to target sports movies." And so you can watch a sports movie, but there's a lot of different scenes throughout that movie that may invoke different emotional responses.
I think of Rudy, which my daughter was just put on for the first time the other day. I hadn't seen it in forever, but the first half of that movie is actually quite sad. It's his friend dies and it's he's dyslexic, and there's just nothing but sorrow and empathy. It's not till the back half that you get to the good stuff, the happy stuff.
Dan Frankel:
He gets his sack.
Scott Dahlgren:
He gets his sack. Exactly.
David Bloom:
He gets his sack.
Dan Frankel:
That's the movie. He gets a sack.
Scott Dahlgren:
So it's really the scene-level targeting, I think, is the 2.0 contextual. It's not just the-
David Bloom:
Well, we'll wrap it here. I'm David Bloom with Next TMT and Dan Frankel, my colleague and co-founder here with Scott Dahlgren from Wurl about contextual advertising, emotions scene by scene. Thanks a lot.
Scott Dahlgren:
Thanks so much.