  Despite the fact that advertisements (ads) often include strongly emotional
content, very little work has been devoted to affect recognition (AR) from ads.
This work explicitly compares content-centric and user-centric ad AR
methodologies, and evaluates the impact of enhanced AR on computational
advertising via a user study. Specifically, we (1) compile an affective ad
dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users; (2) explore the
efficacy of content-centric convolutional neural network (CNN) features for
encoding emotions, and show that CNN features outperform low-level emotion
descriptors; (3) examine user-centered ad AR by analyzing Electroencephalogram
(EEG) responses acquired from eleven viewers, and find that EEG signals encode
emotional information better than content descriptors; (4) investigate the
relationship between objective AR and subjective viewer experience while
watching an ad-embedded online video stream based on a study involving 12
users. To our knowledge, this is the first work to (a) expressly compare user
vs content-centered AR for ads, and (b) study the relationship between modeling
of ad emotions and its impact on a real-life advertising application.
