[Tech Talks] What is image recognition technology and how is it redefining marketing?

AI isn’t a new trend in marketing, as complex algorithms have already been applied to budget, allocation, task automation, and performance analysis. This is now slowly but surely moving in the creative field and should not be ignored.

So how does it work?

Mantas Ciuksys, Director of Content Marketing, Socialbakers, explains image recognition technology and how it is already redefining marketing today.

Ai in image recognition is essentially a set of algorithms that are trained to identify patterns in images or videos on the individual pixel level. It can learn from those patterns, improve its accuracy over time and speed with which it finds them. 

Now it requires huge amounts of photos to train it so that it can learn all the possible objects or elements in any image or video. 

And once it’s done, it unlocks pretty crazy new tools and completely changes the entire process of content ideation, creations, and simply just how we get good content ideas out to market. 

Here’s how it helps:

Trend Recognition. 

Every marketer knows that hours go into content trend analysis every week, month, quarter. It’s often the slowest part of the entire creation process. It’s also hardly ever backed by any real data that supports the content ideas brought to the table. We, marketers, often work on a hunch.  

AI image recognition replaces is the tedious process of sifting through hundreds of images either on Google or manually going through social media campaigns online to find and save the best ideas. So the selection process that’s usually driven by your gut feelings is replaced with AI’s ability to identify exactly what you’re looking for from like millions of images. Your storyboard, your ideas are now backed by data. 

Logo Recognition. 

Now it’s an obvious one. It’s especially critical to brand marketers. Think even sponsorships. Currently, brand marketers are primarily measuring their sponsorship results based on surveys, statistical data provided by either the event organizers themselves or the data on the coverage of those events through TV or online broadcasts. What’s usually missing is knowing how much more brand lift did you gain from your sponsorship through the event coverage on social media - a channel that is a huge slice of the pie. 

AI logo recognition allows marketers to instantly calculate how much more exposure did their brand gets from their logo being visible in the images or videos shared across social channels. 

This is only the first application, you can add to the list items like influencer marketing, brand loyalty, brand recognition. What’s key to takeaway is that this is not something you can actually do manually, you simply wouldn’t know where to turn, with AI this is a click-of-a-button process. 

Interest Recognition. 

The end goal for all of us, marketers, is to understand what our audiences truly care about. It is the core of every strategy and campaign. In this sense every puzzle piece to building a full picture of the consumer is invaluable. 

With the new AI-Vision image recognition technology from Socialbakers, you can actually use AI to find images based on audience interests, that’s based on your actual marketing persona interests - personas that are defined by the platform based on your own first-party data.

This is the kind of innovation that does change marketing. It redefines how we approach content creation. While it may take a second to let go of the practices and habits we’ve built over a long time in the creative area, there is little doubt that those creative marketers that are able to readily equip AI as part of their toolset will not only be able to bring about best ideas but likely skip miles ahead of what we thought possible creatively. 

About Socialbakers:

Socialbakers is the trusted social media management partner to thousands of enterprise brands and SMBs. Leveraging the largest social media dataset in the industry, Socialbakers’ unified marketing platform helps brands large and small ensure their investment in social media is delivering measurable business outcomes. With over 3,000 clients across 100 countries, Socialbakers is the leading social media management platform. Socialbakers has been a Facebook Marketing Partner since 2011, a Pinterest Marketing Partner since 2017, and a LinkedIn Marketing Partner since 2017. Socialbakers was named in the 2018 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in Europe