Pongr Launches ImagePulse®, The First Visual Search Engine To Measure Brand Sentiment.

Online, June 12, 2011 (Newswire.com) - When a brand wants to connect with its most devoted fans, it might have trouble seeing them. Many people who now share photos of their favorite foods, fashions and products on the Web are virtually "invisible."

Consumers snap and share billions of pictures every day with their mobile phones. As the volume of these photos continues to rise, the quality and frequency of tagging is going down. Informal brand ambassadors aren't aiming to advertise - their impulses to share brand-themed photos are social and thus, do not come labeled with hashtags.

ImagePulse® is the first visual search engine that uses computer vision technology to index and rank the endless stream of brand photos spread across cyberspace. Pongr's image-recognition platform "sees" company logos regardless if they are tagged or not.

Each photo is given a Purchase Intent Score based on an additional layer of text analysis for buying words.

"A picture is much more indicative of product interest than a Tweet," says Pongr CEO Jamie Thompson. "There are lots of sentiment analysis tools out there, but none of them offer visual sentiment analysis. There's now a new way to meaningfully tap into existing customer behavior, speed up collection of data and provide a direct response."

Voluntary product endorsements organically happen as a routine part of life. Examples of fan photos include iPad lovers photographing themselves in the Apple Store, Hard Rock Cafe diners hamming it up in their logo t-shirts or a fashion hound posing in front of a Versace or Gucci shop window.

"Advertisers can use ImagePulse® to learn how, when and where their unofficial brand ambassadors -- and the competition's -- are marketing their products in social networks," Thompson says. "We also can track down fan photos anywhere they are shared: on blogs, social media, mobile phone apps and online photo albums."

In a preliminary search of Twitter photos (tagged and untagged) over a recent five-week period, ImagePulse® collected and analyzed more than 80,000 fan photos in 47 sample brands. This fan-generated content represents a tiny fraction of the visual brand sentiment expressed across the Web:

BRAND LOGOS ON TWITTER
Brand Fan Photos
1. Google 22,483
2. Apple 14.452
3. Android 11,127
4. Starbucks 10,713
5. Coca-Cola 6,339
6. Nike 5,754
7. adidas 5,244
8. Nintendo 5,094
9. McDonald's 3,435
10. Converse 3,215

Companies can also learn what else excites their most loyal customers with "conjunctive interspend" data that tracks engagement with other favorite brands. For example, advertisers may find that a high percentage of adidas fans own iPods, drink Starbucks, watch MTV and shop at Target. ImagePulse® helps brands take advantage of volumes of fan-generated content that previously didn't show up on the radar.