The last three years have been among the most stressful for the people of Croatia. The country was struck by earthquakes, ranked 8th in the world in COVID-19 deaths, and the recent conflict in Ukraine felt too close for a nation that lived through some of the cruelest wars in recent history. All this resulted in an alarming rise in mental health issues –the highest in recent years, with 50% of the population suffering from high anxiety levels.

Croatians do not talk openly about their mental health. They are reluctant to talk about it.

Increased levels of anxiety and emotional stress contribute to the development of mental health issues and chronic diseases and, consequently, lead to shorter life expectancy, which for Croatians who tend not to take preventive health check-ups, is already shorter than the European average.

For this reason, Croatia Insurance decided to emphasize the importance of prevention in health care by offering free preventive medical check-ups and encouraging users to take timely care of their health by contracting Supplementary Health Insurance.

Our solution was the AI Anxiety Meter, the first DOOH campaign that measures anxiety, the most complex emotional state to detect. We developed a tool that correlated emotional state with health risk level and offered a personalized solution. This made us the first brand in the world to run a real-time programmatic campaign based on anxiety.

We used cameras in existing digital DOOH locations and paired them with AI-based mood recognition algorithms that could perform facial coding and measure the anxiety levels of passers-by. Google Face Mesh and automatic facial emotion recognition technology (FER), along with other algorithms, analyzed facial muscles using machine learning to identify a combination of eight emotions defined as anxiousness.

The implementation was intuitive and straightforward: as passers-by walked by, the screen invited them to participate. Users stood in front of the screen and gave their consent by waiting 5 seconds for the application to scan their faces and indicate their level of anxiety.

Depending on the result, a dynamic, personalized message was displayed. Those with the highest anxiety levels were directed to a free preventive check-up, while those with lower levels received messages about the importance of Supplementary Health Insurance.

Our campaign rolled out in four stages:

#1: We ran a network test of the algorithm to select locations with high pedestrian traffic and the highest levels of detected anxiety among pedestrians. All ad interactions were GDPR-compliant.

#2: A test flight ran across 14 screens in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, to prove that the real-time personalized ads would increase website traffic and bookings for preventive check-ups at Croatia Insurance's polyclinic.

#3: We extended the reach of the DOOH campaign to Croatia's three largest cities.

#4: The AI Anxiety Meter was freely available within Croatia Insurance's mobile app.

We showed that an encounter with an ad can help you live a healthier life.

Instead of people watching ads, they now watch them back for the greater good - their mental health.