Digital economy

YouTube and Netflix advertising will harness emotions thanks to Ai

Thanks to artificial intelligence, commercials will come in by capturing the audience's emotional peak in a predictive way. The new frontiers of the 'intention economy'

1 June 2025

3' min read

Imagine you are watching a video: right at the moment of maximum emotional engagement, the playback stops to show you an advertisement for a product perfectly related to the content you have just seen. This is what YouTube is going to do with its new 'Peak points' tool, which uses artificial intelligence (Google's Gemini model in particular) to detect emotional peaks in videos and strategically place advertisements precisely at the moments of the viewer's greatest vulnerability.

This technology identifies moments when videos register high levels of user attention and places advertisements immediately after these moments. It is a new frontier in advertising and economics, using the emotionality and unconsciousness of users to maximise earnings.

Even Netflix is banking on it

Streaming platform Netflix also recently announced that it is developing a new advertising format based on artificial intelligence, which will allow advertisers to visually associate their products with the platform's original content. During the 'Netflix Upfront 2025' event, Amy Reinhard, president of Netflix's advertising division, unveiled the new format of interactive ads based on artificial intelligence, which will be inserted both during playback and when the user pauses the content.

These ads will use Aiper to adapt to the visual and thematic context of the content, allowing, for example, the insertion of products or advertisements that blend in with the aesthetics of series such as Stranger Things or Bridgerton. This tool is part of the practical application of so-called 'persuasive technologies', where chatbots and algorithms target advertising through access to huge amounts of intimate psychological and behavioural data.

The Ai strategic element to maximise advertising revenue

According to Alphabet's financial report for the first quarter of 2025, YouTube generated $8.93 billion in advertising revenue, registering an increase of 10.3% compared to the same period last year. Alphabet's announced strategic investment of $75 billion to upgrade the Ai infrastructure in 2025 is tangible proof of a business model that aims to maximise every second of viewer attention.

The new frontier of advertising: the economics of intention

A study by researchers at the University of Cambridge has introduced the concept of the 'economics of intention'. The research, published in the Harvard data science review delves into how artificial intelligence can map and influence users' desires before they are even aware of them. The authors, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn of the Leverhulme centre for the future of intelligence, describe how artificial intelligence - particularly large-scale language models - can map, predict and even influence users' intentions before they are aware of them.

"We warn that artificial intelligence tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, predict and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes," the study reads.

According to researchers, the intention economy represents a new commercial frontier in which the motivations and desires of individuals become a commodity. Ai technologies, through the analysis of behavioural and psychological data, could manipulate users' choices in various areas, from consumption preferences to political decisions.

Advertising becomes "predictive"

According to the report "The Evolution of AI in Marketing 2025" 37% of marketers consider Ai to be the main source of success for virality and content distribution. With the introduction of Ai in their advertisements, Netflix and YouTube are no longer limited to tailoring the advertisement to the viewer's tastes: they will be able to place it exactly at the moment when attention is highest and emotional engagement is highest. Not only that. Advertising, as was already the case on social media, becomes a vehicle of information itself, mixing with video content.