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.
John
Legend
as the
Rat King
Mood Board gives user an idea of what’s engaging the target at the moment.
Don
Rickles