Abstract
The advancement of technology is set to disrupt industries globally. Industry leaders must innovate from traditional approaches to doing business in order to stay relevant and profitable. Digital technology has advanced to become one of the major disruptive forces across economies and advertising has not been spared the trend. With innovations in digital technology, sophisticated systems like artificial intelligence are created. Artificial intelligence is simply a technique through which computer algorithms mimic the human brain in decision making enabled by enormous amount of data fed into them. Advertisers and marketers, having recognized the effectiveness of the system for applications like content development and response forecasting are embracing the technology in an increasing rate across the world. The study sought to explore the application of this technology in the Nigerian advertising industry with emphasis on emotive advertising. Calabar Metropolis was used as a study area. Given the inherent dependence of artificial intelligence on big data, the study sought to identify ways of obtaining that data for forecasting consumer emotive responses to advertising. To test the influence of emotion on audience decision-making, a number of tools were used which include questionnaires, quantitative content analysis, focus group discussion as well as informal interviews. The result obtained indicated that it was possible to harness audience emotion for intuitive and predictive advertising for a market like Nigeria where there is less focus on data collection, storage and retrieval across institutions. Based on these findings, the study recommends that advertisers should approach content development with audience affective responses in mind to be able to predict with a measure of certainty, their return on marketing investment using a technology like artificial intelligence.