Advertising Age - October 31, 2016

WITH PHOTOS AND VIDEO flowing fast and freely across screens via countless social media outlets, apps and websites, “visual overload” is an understatement when it comes to our media landscape. For a planner or creative looking for campaign inspiration, picking through such an image salad might be daunting. But salvation may be waiting in an unlikely place—ad tech.

Annalect, Omnicom’s data and marketing sciences group, will soon debut Content Inspiration, a platform that promises to give ad execs a better sense of what images, videos, themes and trends are resonating with audiences— even targets as highly specific as yoga-obsessed millennials in Venice Beach or luxury-minded yet eco-conscious hipster male car shoppers in Austin.

“It’s not about being a cat
owner, it’s about being a cat cud-
dler,” said Annalect Global CEO
Slavi Samardzija. “That’s the level
of detail we can get to.”
The platform was created out of
Annalect Labs, the company’s divi-
sion dedicated to building out
innovative ideas. “It falls in the
area of how do we actually use
large-scale behavioral data to drive
business outcomes, specifically
focused on using data to drive cre-
ativity and content development,”
he said. Users of the new service
plug in their targets, and the plat-
form uses AI-fueled computer
vision, or image recognition, to
pull and parse relevant content
from outlets including Instagram,
You Tube, Pinterest, The New York
Times, Refinery29 and BuzzFeed.
It digests the information to show
its users what kind of content
appeals to specific audiences,
down to subject matter, emotional
sentiment and color palette.

Ad Age got a preview of the platform analysis on one of the targets, Texas hipster male car shoppers who give as big a damn about bling as they do about saving the planet.

The findings manifest in a multi-tiered interactive presentation, with each level drilling down to reveal increasingly specific breakdowns of content rated relevant to the given audience. One tier, for example, features a video wall, the “Mood Board,” which gives the user a view of what kind of content the target is most engaged with at the moment.

In the case of the Austin car
shoppers, our test pulled up con-
tent including a Jimmy Fallon seg-
ment featuring a phone call
between (a faux) Donald Trump
and Ted Cruz, a You Tube video
showing what’s inside a rat-
tlesnake’s rattle and a “Frozen”
sing-a-long video.

The next tier breaks the videos down into images, each of which is parsed out into relevant subject matter. Another presents and organizes images by the top objects in each frame and others pull out dominant colors and emotional sentiment. There’s even one level that reveals the most prominent logos in the content.

The platform, in beta, took about 10 hours to serve up the findings.

But to put things in perspective, three years ago Annalect would run crowdsourcing campaigns that had people manually labeling content. That took 15 hours for 30 videos. For this exercise, Content Inspiration analyzed 1,000 videos in two-thirds of that time—and that’s not even an accurate picture of what ultimately it will be able to do. “As we scale it for clients and across agencies, it will change drastically,” said Annalect Labs Director Anna Nicanorova. “The bottom line is that computer vision outperforms humans.”

COMPUTER VISION DRILLS
DOWN FOR INSPIRATION
By Ann-Christine Diaz — adiaz@creativity-online.com
HOLIDAY WATCH:
ADS FROM TARGET,
BEST BUY AND REI

TARGET is making a big Hispanic push, increasing its holiday investment in TV by 21% with 16 broadcast spots. Its “Make the Holidays Spectacular” campaign centers around a young girl directing a Broadway-style musical production called “The Toycracker.” 72andSunny created the effort with the retailer’s internal marketing team.

BEST BUY is tapping 90-year-old comedian Don Rickles as part of its “Holiday Gifting Made Easy” campaign. One spot shows him “roasting” a chestnut. In another spot, chef Bobby Flay stars as a “ginger” who knows bread. In all, Best Buy will run a total of 15 spots from Grey Advertising this holiday.

Outdoor lifestyle retailer REI will once again close its 149 stores on Black Friday for the return of its “#OptOutside” program—this time with a slew of official partners. More than 275 national and local organizations have teamed with REI to stay away from the mall and “Opt Outside,” including state and national parks, schools and corporate partners such as Subaru, Google, Meetup, Upworthy and outdoor brands Burton, Keen, Yeti and Prana.