Thursday, 1 September 2016

Selfie Mining

Now a days it's common that personal stories are described using social images. We might be thinking the pictures we snapped of ourselves and posted on social media sites are just for our friends on those platforms. But it's high time to correct this misbelief. Only those data we mark as private are actually guarded by the privacy laws. The rest all is public. Marketers are grabbing our images for research. This process is called selfie mining.
When we take a picture of ourselves we do so without promoting a specific product in mind. But that is not the case with marketers. They might be interested in our clothing, products we use, emotions on our face etc. There are companies that mine for selfies. They use APIs to access the images and the most interesting aspect of it is that the owners are unaware of this. Actually intentionally or unintentionally selfies promote whatever we are wearing or are sitting near or using. Many digital marketing companies have built technology to scan and process photos, to identify particular interests or hobbies. This in turn helps to better target advertisers.
Two of these companies are Ditto Labs and Piqora.
Ditto Labs: It scans photos on different sites like Instagram to generate insights for customers. Ditto Labs places users into categories, such as “sports fans” and “foodies” based on the context of their images. Advertisers such as Kraft Foods Group Inc. pay Ditto Labs to find their products’ logos in photos on social media.The following aspects are taken into consideration:

  • Products- Users who post images of food items and beverages are flagged for these interests.
  • Clothing- Ditto classifies objects. It also detects fabrics or patterns in clothing.
  • Faces- The emotions in the face help advertisers to understand sentiment.
  • Logos- Advertisers can search for photos featuring brands to steal customers.
  • Scenes- Analysing the background of images helps the advertisers to find where and how customers use their products.

Piqora: They store images for months on their own servers to show marketers what is trending in popularity. Piqora mainly analyses images in Pinterest. It was recently acquired by Olapic which analyses images on Instagram.
Well, these indicates that some of the best digital marketing trends are all on the way. Let's hope that the best is yet to come in near future.

Source:
http://programmaticadvertising.org/2014/10/20/selfie-mining-whats-really-going-on/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/smile-marketing-firms-are-mining-your-selfies-1412882222
We anyways have to think, why not think big?

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