DAIVID Brings Its AI Ad Analysis to Japan—And It’s All About Emotions
UK-based adtech firm DAIVID is making a high-stakes entry into Japan’s competitive advertising scene, announcing a strategic partnership with local TV measurement giant Video Research. At the center of this move: Emolyzer, a new AI-powered creative testing platform designed specifically for Japanese marketers who are drowning in content and desperate for faster, smarter ad evaluation.
And DAIVID’s pitch is clear—forget old-school panel testing. This platform analyzes how your ad feels to your audience, using machine learning and heaps of creative data.
What’s New
At its core, Emolyzer is a predictive AI tool that helps marketers gauge how emotionally resonant their ads will be—before spending a single yen on distribution. Built for the Japanese market in collaboration with Video Research (Japan’s gold standard for TV metrics), the self-serve platform lets advertisers test videos for emotional impact, brand lift potential, and key perception indicators like trustworthiness and originality.
The kicker? It delivers insights almost instantly, powered by millions of Japanese consumer response data points, without needing traditional audience panels.
Why It Matters
As advertising content multiplies across digital channels, speed is everything. Marketers are under pressure to produce, test, and launch campaigns at a breakneck pace—while still justifying every yen of media spend. Emolyzer directly addresses this problem by replacing slow-moving, manual evaluation processes with rapid AI predictions.
Ian Forrester, CEO of DAIVID, emphasized this urgency:
“With so much content being produced across so many different channels, advertisers need smarter tools to keep up… Emolyzer helps marketers cut through the noise, maximise media spend and unlock the emotional impact of their creative.”
That’s not hyperbole. Emolyzer offers a second-by-second breakdown of viewer emotions, predictions on which viewer groups will connect most deeply with an ad, and 18 custom metrics from Video Research, including message clarity and product perception.
Tech That Gets Under the Skin (of Viewers)
The secret sauce behind Emolyzer is its use of computer vision and audio analysis APIs, which feed into a predictive algorithm trained on Japanese cultural and behavioral data. DAIVID has spent years refining this model, in part through ongoing partnerships like the one with Tokyo-based ADK Marketing Solutions.
“Marketers can now avoid blowing their budgets on wasted creative,” said Yoshihiko Iemura of ADK. “This is about scaling what works—and ditching what doesn’t—before you go live.”
The Broader Context
AI in ad testing isn’t new—but localized emotion prediction is. Most global tools rely on Western-centric datasets that don’t translate cleanly into markets like Japan, where cultural nuance heavily influences how ads are received. Emolyzer sidesteps this by building its dataset from the ground up in collaboration with Japan’s most trusted media analytics provider.
Makoto Ogi of Video Research noted,
“As the video advertising market continues to grow rapidly, there is increasing demand for faster and more efficient evaluation methods… Emolyzer meets that need.”
That’s a sharp contrast to legacy creative testing systems that require weeks of feedback cycles and manual interpretation.
What’s Next?
DAIVID’s Japan play is more than a one-off product launch. It’s a signal of broader ambitions—positioning itself as a global player in AI-powered creative intelligence. With Emolyzer, DAIVID joins a growing list of companies racing to integrate emotional AI into the marketing stack, alongside rivals like System1 and Affectiva.
But the Japan-first strategy is smart. It sidesteps saturated Western markets and instead enters a high-spend ad economy where measurement is taken seriously and localization is king.
