PicScout Growth, Author at PicScout

Campaign Monitoring with AI: A Marketing Game-changer

Campaign Monitoring Essentials for Beginners

Are you responsible for monitoring your campaign across social media and the web? You know, it’s essential you start off on the right foot as tracking your brand’s multi-channel approach can be daunting at the outset, and downright messy if not measured properly. Here we’ll explore the beginnings of campaign monitoring across multiple digital channels and platforms – and where most of them start are with visuals.

The average brand has hundreds, if not thousands, of visual assets at their disposal. And while it’s more than likely that most filenames are obscure (how about 2017_03_27.jpg anyone?), it’s nearly impossible to capture all the relevant details to make your visual assets super discoverable.

Most marketers are struggling to find the time and resources to plan, create and sustain all the visual content that’s expected of them to produce. So it’s pretty much a nightmare having to sift through galleries of endless mislabeled photos trying to find the perfect one for your campaign. It’s also incredibly time-consuming to manually tag images with appropriate keywords so they’re easily searchable in the future.

But it doesn’t have to be this hard. The latest developments in artificial intelligence and image recognition technology boost workflow efficiency significantly, speeding up a bunch of tasks that would ordinarily take a huge chunk of your time and nerves. Game changer.

Boost Your Workflow with Visual Search

With the increase in so much visual content to produce and curate, media management in campaign monitoring is a high priority. While there are a number of tools that help create visual marketing content, there aren’t so many that organize them efficiently so that they’re discoverable in the future.

One such technology that’s developed in response to the explosion of visual content is Visual Search. Visual Search allows you to search for content by visual similarity, instead of relying on text. AI-driven Visual Search scans large image collections to find identical or similar images to the one you’re looking for. As visuals are the marketing language du jour, Visual Search helps you to find images you might not have the words to describe.

What’s more, Visual Search is instrumental organizing large image collections. It automates media management in identifying duplicates and unwanted images that you might want to clean from your image library.

Whoever said a picture is worth 1000 words was never responsible for its metadata

With the trend to immersive marketing, campaigns are often run across a number of different channels, and things often slip through the cracks when monitoring those campaigns — like adding metadata to your media. The tedious, thankless, but absolutely necessary work of manually labeling each visual asset can be swiftly accomplished with AI-driven auto-tagging.

The fusion of artificial intelligence with image recognition technology has enabled computers to ‘see’ objects and context within visual content, and in turn tag the visuals with appropriate keywords. With suggested auto-tagging, marketers can find the visual content they’re looking for far quicker, enabling them to repurpose the content or simply simply move on to the next task.

An instant return on investment.

Don’t I Know You? Facial Recognition & People Analysis

Not only can a computer ‘see’ objects within visuals, the advancements of face detection and recognition capabilities enables computers to also recognize faces and even identify specific people when trained.

Marketers, PR firms and photo agencies can use this technology when searching visuals with a certain demographic in mind, or to find a specific person within their image library. This is extremely useful when managing brand ambassadors and high-value assets. Not only can the technology produce all images featuring the nominated talent, but it also eliminates the need to manually classify each visual with the talent’s name. Huge time-saver — another instant return on investment.

Digital Media Management in Monitoring your Campaign in 2017

AI is shaping so many aspects of the marketing process — yet despite the over-hyped fear of marketers being replaced with AI, the reality in 2017 is much more benign. As we’ve shown here, anything that seems rote or mechanical can be replaced with good AI, freeing up marketers to concentrate on the most important aspect of their job: marketing.

Media management in tracking your campaign is just one aspect of the capabilities of AI-driven image recognition technology. Using real-time visual demographic data, for example, allows marketers to monitor their campaigns and target commercials with demographic-specific content. Creative ways of using facial recognition technology includes screens at gas stations and in malls scanning customers’ faces in order to run tailored ads.

We’ll explore the many other ways AI and computer vision can be adapted for marketers and creative agencies in our next AI + Marketing instalment. For a taster, check out how image recognition technology can measure a brand’s visual impact with PicScout’s Insights for Business.

Why You Need To Measure Your Marketing Campaign Every Time

Last week Apple dropped a surprise on the world in a most un-Apple way: instead of a splashy press conference with Tim Cook, the tech giant issued a quiet press release with little fanfare, announcing the imminent launch of its ‘Red’ iPhone series to support the HIV/AIDS charity (RED). Genius marketing campaign. Learning how and why it was so successful is essential — not only for Apple — but for all businesses in planning and monitoring their campaigns.

Launching Your Marketing Campaign with a Surprise

With little more than six days between the announcement and its release, Apple managed to ride that wave of surprise for maximum benefit. It was pounced upon by tech magazines the world over and embraced by Apple-devotees across social media: meanwhile, the Apple store was offline in anticipation of the release.

Here at PicScout, we explored the impact of this alternative iPhone and its unconventional launch (for Apple, that is). It’s the first time Apple has released a new iPhone case color out of cycle, and also the first time Apple has collaborated with (RED) on the iPhones.

Step 1: Who was most excited for the launch?

The folks in the USA led the way in the visual buzz over Apple’s new release. Over a third of all images published and shared in anticipation of the (RED) iPhone took place in the United States.

Following the USA was the United Kingdom, India, France, and Mexico. It’s interesting to note India’s high presence — reflecting Apple’s increasing attention on India as an important emerging market for the company.

Step 2: Planning ahead, where was most of the visual buzz?

Anticipation of the (RED) iPhone dominated social media, with posts featuring pictures of the soon-to-be-launched phone amassing a wide-ranging visual conversation.

Step 3: Which image was the most popular?

The most widely published and shared image was the one you see above — displaying the back of the (RED) iPhone in its two available sizes, the iPhone 7 & 7 plus. Perhaps it was the most popular because it showcases the highlight of the phone — its sleek red back. Alternatively, other images that reveal its white front (no change from the current iPhone styles) were often included in articles that criticized the white front casing.

Seeing Red? Then Hack Your Own Marketing Campaign for Success!

The combination of an unexpected announcement and release, together with the bright color of the (RED) iPhone proved to be a much-needed refreshment from Apple. The design language that many premium phone companies employ — that elegant gold devices are synonymous with premium quality — is increasingly being perceived as tired and stale.

We’ll leave you with a snapshot of (RED)’s celebrity ambassador, Alison Williams of ‘Girls’ fame. Her endorsement caught the attention of Vogue magazine, which proudly announced that red is the color of the season. Perhaps Apple knew that already. Even if not, they’ve just confirmed it.

To measure the visual impact of your brand in depth, have a chat with us about Insights for Business.

Which Puppy is Most Popular? Test Your Dog’s Brand Awareness!

It’s International Puppy Day — a great occasion to celebrate our beloved pet dogs! In analyzing how brand awareness affects our favorite dogs (and their popularity), we wanted to explore which pup was snapped, published and shared the most online.

Our technology scanned all the dog pictures online (yes, there are fewer than cats, but it IS the internet) and then using our AI-driven computer vision, we tested each dog breed’s brand awareness by sorting through and discovering which breeds were most popular.

Once we retrieved the results, we asked ourselves what makes this dog the most widely shared pup? And lo and behold, many of the results correspond to the most popular dog breeds of 2016!

More insights are below the infographic. But before you check out the scorecard below, test yourself and see how close you came to the actual results!

Top 5 Published Puppies of 2017

1: Golden Retriever

2: Labrador

3: Pug

4: Bulldog

5: Yorkshire Terrier

Both the Golden Retriever and the Labrador received similar high-visibility results – totaling more than double the pics of those dogs beyond the top five cut-off. These two breeds dominate the USA’s most popular dog breeds for many years in the running.

Bulldogs and Yorkshire Terriers also made the Top 10 most popular dog breeds of 2016.

This only goes to show that online visibility does have an impact on a brand’s (or dog’s) popularity.

Happy Puppy Day from PicScout!

How to Insure Your Marketing Strategy from Day One

Planning Your Marketing Strategy: Where to Start?

So you’re ready to launch a new product. Boost a service. Announce a partnership. Sponsor an event. Sign an Ambassador. Whatever you want to communicate – you need a plan. Basically, you need a kick-ass marketing strategy to efficiently and successfully get your message out there.

But where are you going to start? And how is it going to look like? Whatever you plan to do, visuals will definitely be part of your language.

Using visual content to communicate today is a no-brainer — speaking in visuals is the marketing language du jour. So in order to have a bulletproof marketing strategy, it’s critical to start with powerful visual content to kick off your on-message branding.

Ta-da! Visual content created. Now what?

So now that you’ve invested time and energy in creating this wowser visual content, you can sit back and wait for your next burst of creativity. Actually, no. You’re not finished yet.

So what’s next? Where do you store this visual content? Who can use it and find it in your storage system? Where will it be published? Once its published, how do you measure its impact?

Here we’ll explore the lifecycle of visual content: create, store, publish, measure. Once it’s created, what’s the best way to manage its storage? And once it’s published, what’s the best way to measure its success?

A Kick Ass Marketing Strategy Starts With Efficient Media Management

To keep up with the ever-increasing demand for visual content, there’s a wide range of storage systems that help organize it efficiently. Here we’ll take a closer look at Digital Asset Management (DAM) products, but the case can be applied to a number of digital storage systems.

“If only images were made of text…Searching for them would be so much easier!”

How often do you hear this? Where’s the ‘easy button’ to help with the massive challenge of making visual content as discoverable and as productive as possible? While it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, whoever said that was never responsible for inputting that picture’s metadata.

Assigning textual metadata to images is tedious, thankless, but absolutely necessary work. The metadata helps visual content become discoverable within DAM products, as all use traditional text-based search methods.

Automating Media Management

This is where image recognition technology can form a natural partnership with Digital Asset Management systems. The complimentary capabilities help save an enormous amount of time and energy spent on metadata application and asset retrieval. Let’s look at some below:

Visual Search identifies the same or similar images, while removing unwanted images and duplications.

Think of a hotel chain that, in anticipation of summer holiday bookings, want to display images of their best properties that feature swimming pools. Using just one hero image, Visual Search will showcase all images that have swimming pools in them, that resemble the similar visual style of the original hero shot.

Suggested auto-tagging automatically assigns tags to your images based on image content.

Suggested auto-tagging labels and classifies visual content automatically, potentially saving days, if not weeks of manually applying metadata to files. What’s more, the quicker the visual content is tagged, the quicker it can be accessed by all users. This is a win-win for all involved.

Facial search and recognition technology identifies faces within images, searches for similar faces across your collection, obtains demographic data, and can find specific people within large image collections.

Imagine a company that wants to identify and tag its brand ambassador across their large image library. This single facial recognition capability alone is a game-changer for PR and marketing agencies in managing their talent across large image collections.

Don’t Rush Your Marketing Strategy Planning

Many brands today create visual content based on the latest design scheme and push it out to market, while remaining oblivious to how customers and prospects perceive their hard work. If more than 80% of branded content has no direct mention of the brand itself, then how can we measure its success?

In this way, most images are missed by traditional text-based analytics, leaving your company out of your own visual conversation. Image recognition technology applied by PicScout’s Insights for Business monitors your visual content analyzes its impact, engagement and reach. It provides insights that can help develop new growth engines, customize product innovation, build brand loyalty, and evaluate the ROI of brand ambassadors.

The lifecycle of visual content, if managed and measured with PicScout, turns your images from simple communicators into measurable, actionable assets.

Purim Partying @ PicScout

Purim is the Jewish festival known for a party atmosphere — it takes us all back to childhood with costumes, gift-giving and merry-making. But who says it’s just for kids?

It’s traditionally a one-day affair. But as it’s always a good time to party and with spring in the air, it’s become customary to celebrate all week long. Our week leading up to Purim was packed with practical jokes, stuffed toys, mountains of chocolate and yummy treats. Our annual secret gift exchange event, ‘Gamad V’Anak’ (translated to ‘Dwarf and the Giant’, ie the Israeli version of ‘Secret Santa’), inspired creative riddles and cheeky shenanigans as clues about the identity of each person’s gift-giver.

Toblerone Tableau

Picture Party with Pikachu

Final gift exchange where everyone’s ‘Anaks’ (Giants) were revealed!

Purim was a great opportunity for the team to get together and have fun. There’s nothing like coming to work dressed as Pikachu.

Visual Impact of French Presidential Candidates [Infographic]

Measuring your brand’s visual impact requires the analysis of both visibility and engagement with one’s online presence. In the case of France’s newsworthy presidential elections, the candidates’ visual chatter often corresponds to their actual popularity together with the dominating news piece of the day.

Unsurprisingly, Marine Le Pen dominates both the visual presence and engagement as she emerges as the front runner. François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron are close second and third, respectively. What is interesting is that Fillon’s engagement rate outnumbers his visual presence, highlighting that despite his corruption charges, he is still quite popular with his support base.

Insights include:

Marine Le Pen dominates the visual chatter – which is to be expected of the current front runner. By far the most divisive politician in the race she is arguably the most popular, as her political personality and pedigree regularly attracts the attention of the French media. Riding the wave of anti-establishment resentment, Le Pen’s recent rise in the polls followed a bout of rioting over police brutality. Le Pen’s visual chatter was further boosted by her refusal to wear a hijab when meeting with Lebanon’s Grand Mufti.

Despite corruption charges, the former ‘Mr Clean’ François Fillon has kept up his popularity and engagement among his support base. His visual chatter skyrocketed during the ‘fake jobs’ scandal in January, but now his visual presence is fading as French prosecutors open an official probe into the allegations. He refuses to stand down, and we can see why. Those same charges also increase his visual presence as he’s a news cycle regular.

Also reflecting the polls, Emmanuel Macron’s visual chatter and engagement is steady in third place. As the centrist Macron took the lead in the opinion polls in early February, he became the target of a gay ‘smear campaign’ that increased his visual chatter exponentially. Later that month, he struggled to get his campaign back on track after his controversial remarks on France’s colonial record and gay marriage, provoking outrage on both the right and the left.His visual presence is currently buttressed by his complaints over an anti-Semitic depiction published by his rival, Fillon.

Whether the candidates’ visual impact indicates their results, only time will tell. This election may be full of surprises – which can measured by the visual impact of the candidates in their run for President. Stay tuned.

What is Visual Search? Learn image recognition basics with PicScout

What’s visual search? And why is it so popular?

In today’s image-driven world, it’s getting more and more difficult to find specific products using a text query.

Say you spot something you really love, but you don’t know how to find it or what it’s even called: visual search lets you find all those things you don’t have the words to describe. Think of it as a Search Engine that allows you to easily access, organize, or recommend your images or products by visual similarity.

It’s the logical next step, as it stops the keyword guessing game to find that photo, drawing, art piece, map, or blueprint in an instant. It’s a natural application to eCommerce, but it doesn’t stop there.

With the snap of a camera, manufacturers can use the technology as a tool to identify the components of their inventory. Publishers, meanwhile, can use Visual Search to source quality visual content from their photo libraries. And Digital Asset Management (DAM) software can incorporate Visual Search capabilities to organize and curate their customers’ content — visually.

Visual Search: helping you find all those things you don’t have the words to describe.

Get on board and see here how it can apply to your business.

Visual Search stops the keyword guessing game to find that photo, drawing, art piece, map, or blueprint in an instant.

Change the way you and your customers search: contact us today to discuss PicScout’s powerful and scalable Visual API.

Visibility In Digital Marketing: Where Are All The Women?

For International Women’s Day, we were concerned with the visibility of women — specifically the visibility of women in the highest echelons of business and education. That’s the nucleus of shifting cultural attitudes, and we were curious whether visuals match reality when it comes to the digital marketing of these companies. Whether what we see is really what we get.

And this can be applied to all businesses: what do the images displayed on an organization’s website say about its brand? How does the visual content of their digital marketing efforts mirror reality? And does it reflect the organization’s internal machinations?

So we put our ‘Insights for Business’ to the test: we scanned each website of each Fortune 500 company and the world’s top 50 universities to measure the visibility of women as part of their online brand. This would give us insights into the visual presence of each organization.

Using artificial intelligence-driven computer vision, we applied our ‘People Analysis’ tool to the hundreds of thousands of images we measured. Some of its capabilities includes identifying faces within images and obtaining demographic data (age, gender, ethnicity) of those people within the images.

The results are…

after the infographic!

The results are surprising — in a good way. Women feature in 40% of all images that have people in them. Not bad for a demographic which was once near-invisible in business marketing material.

What is also surprising is that the results for both the Fortune 500 companies and the top universities are EXACTLY THE SAME! (Do you think they aimed for a 40:60 ratio of images to feature women? Is that the new corporate branding? Some questions for you to think about at home.)

Not only are the results of both Fortune 500 companies and the top universities exactly the same, but results of leadership WITHIN these organizations also have similarities.

While women CEOs make up 5.4% of the Fortune 500 companies, 20% of available board seats are filled by women. Conversely in the academic sphere, 20% of the top 50 universities worldwide are led by women. Yet there is much debate as to the alleged weighted distribution among tenured faculty and full professors.

One thing is for sure: women are not so invisible any longer — at least not online.

What You Need To Know About Image Auto Tagging

Where Seeing is Believing Auto Tagging

Wading through galleries of endless mislabeled photos, trying to find a particular image is both frustrating and time-consuming. What was its file name? When was it filed? Why hasn’t this image been tagged with keywords to help me find it?! Surely there’s an app for that. There is — yet it’s not an app, it’s an API. It’s where artificial intelligence meets computer vision, enabling the computer to suggest auto tags for your images based on what it sees. That’s right — sees. PicScout’s image recognition technology identifies faces, objects, concepts and image styles, helping categorize and curate visual content based on keywords tagged automatically by the computer.

Black Hole of Undiscoverable Images

Somewhere in your company, there’s a hard drive full of images — about which nobody knows. These are files with careful names such as 1.jpg or gray.png. Nameless, unsorted images without any tags or keywords. Maybe, when creating the image, that someone was too busy. Or in a hurry. But when uploading this image collection into a Digital Asset Management system or similar, it’s still invisible. Why? Because without auto tagged metadata, these images can’t be found. And if you can’t find ‘em, you can’t use ‘em.

Properly tagging metadata can be tedious without the right planning or tools. But it still has to be done. Without it, the media becomes a useless black hole. Yet manually labeling each image one by one is a hassle — who has the time? The patience?

Suggested auto tagging labels your images with appropriate keywords so they’re easily searchable in the future. The auto tags are then part of your image metadata, making your visual content management a breeze.

Media Management Made Easier

Many marketers may be struggling to keep up with the amount of content they’re expected to produce for client campaigns. With the trend to immersive marketing, campaigns are often run across a number of different channels, and things often slip through the cracks — like adding metadata to your media. With suggested auto-tagging, marketers can find the visual content they’re looking for far quicker, so there’s no need to create or buy more. Voila! An instant return on investment.

Find ‘Em Fast

Make your visual content searchable — for you, your colleagues and your clients. Suggested auto tagging helps quickly organize, manage and search through image libraries, with results in seconds. And it’s ideal for a range of industries — all that’s required is some creative thinking. As mentioned above, auto-tagging is ideal for digital marketing. It’s also a natural fit for Digital Asset Management (DAM) products, as auto tagging intuitively builds metadata into your image catalog. Advertising and press agencies can take advantage of PicScout’s facial analysis capabilities, as the resulting auto-tags help monitor brand ambassadors and high-value assets.

Save yourself the time and the hassle of building your own metadata with PicScout’s suggested auto-tagging. Go on, treat yourself. It’s just a taste of the full scope of PicScout’s Visual API.

Why is Brand Value So Important on Oscar Night?

There’s nothing like live TV. Predictions and controversies are all part of the show, folks. It’s what makes the Oscars’ brand value soar. For three years in a row, the front-runner has lost on Oscar night. ‘La La Land’ also lost in one of the biggest and ultra-bizarre Oscar upsets ever.

What does that say about brand value? The films’ brands? The Oscar brand? And does a film’s visual buzz have sway on the actual winners themselves? In analyzing the visual chatter of the 2017 Oscar nominees, we weren’t too far off the mark.

Winners Picked Correctly

Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali

Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis

Best Actress: Emma Stone.

Best Picture: La La Land… for 45 seconds, at least.

Winners We Missed and Why (Analyzing Real vs, Projected Brand Value)

Best Actor: ~~Ryan Gosling~~ Casey Affleck

In terms of visual presence, Ryan Gosling is one of the strongest celebrity brands in Hollywood. His age, good looks and choice of personable roles all have contributed to his popularity across the web and social media. Starring in ‘La La Land’, the season’s front-runner film and opposite the ‘Best Actress’ favorite Emma Stone, increased his visual chatter exponentially.

Casey Affleck’s visual presence is another story. Casey has famously eschewed the Hollywood lifestyle, admitting he isn’t super keen on all the attention that comes with awards season. His role in the critically-acclaimed film ‘Manchester by the Sea’ is a turning point for a career marred by small parts in forgettable films and years of playing second fiddle to his older brother, Ben. As the tabloids dissect the Oscar ceremony, many of them are asking, “Casey who?” This win goes against the trend, as life sometimes turns out that way. See ‘Best Picture’ category — case in point.

Best Picture: ~~La La Land~~ Moonlight

In perhaps the most unbelievable ending to an Oscar ceremony, ‘La La Land’ was awarded the Academy Award for best picture, a mistake that was eventually corrected to honor the actual winner, ‘Moonlight’. It seems the nostalgic musical’s hype and visual dominance caught up to itself, and with ‘La La Land’’s loss, one thing becomes clear: you don’t want to be the early Oscar front-runner. For three years in a row, the front-runner has lost on Oscar night. What’s more, ‘La La Land’ lost in one of the biggest and ultra-bizarre Oscar upsets ever. Nevertheless, they handled the unusual situation with grace and humility.

But what about ‘Moonlight’, the little film that could? It doesn’t star any household names, its director had only directed one other unheard-of feature film, and its budget was a low $1.6 million, (by contrast, ‘La La Land’ was shot for $30 million). It wasn’t selling out theaters or breaking box office records and its visual buzz before the Oscars was trailing behind both ‘La La Land’ and ‘Hidden Figures’. Some interpreted the win as a political message, while others thought it was a nod towards inclusivity. Whatever the pundits reflect, it’s definite that this year, more than ever, the Best Picture contest seems to double as a referendum on America’s cultural conscience.

And the award goes to…

Innovative branding. While ‘La La Land’ enjoyed a hugely successful marketing push from the get-go, ‘Moonlight”s performances and strategic positioning led them to being considered the leading runner-up in the Best Picture category—a huge coup for a low-budget film about a confronting subject.

And with regards to the Best Actor award, visual buzz can only take your brand value so far. Substance often conquers style: if it holds up and is innovative in its expression. This won’t be the last we hear of Casey Affleck (or Casey who?).

From the lens here at PicScout, we understand the importance of strong brand value: the Oscar brand, the Oscar nominee brand, and the brand of the winner. If last night’s events are anything to go by, it’s that independent movie marketers can learn a few things on how better to capitalize on the Oscar brand to enhance their client’s brand value.