Straight to the heart of your target audience: personalized advertising systems based on wearable technology and heart-rate variability

“Speaker’s Box” invites academics and practitioners to identify significant areas of research affecting advertising and marketing. The goal is to bridge the gap between the length of time it takes to produce rigorous work and the acceleration of change within practice. This edition addresses the possible impact of wearable technology (mainly smartwatches) in relation to the ability to match advertising to a person’s emotional state. Advertisers and researchers long have pondered, for example, the impact of placing their messages in the midst of jarring news items (e.g. a message for product in the midst of a tragic and moving news story). Wearables offer the potential of tailoring messages, however, based on biometric data that signals a person’s changing mental state in real time. The authors assess the evidence and point out that although wearables offer significant opportunities for more effective communications, there are significant ethical questions in doing so.