Instagram isn't the only company that wants to make you into the supermodel/spokesperson for erectile dysfunction that you never wanted to be. But execs are busy people; they're not going to sift through all of your photos of homemade pizza and clouds (#nofilter) to find the good stuff. (boobs.)
According to Ad Age, a bunch of startups (like Gazemetrix, which recognizes brand logos in images) are trying to figure out how they can quickly search out the photos they need to try and sell you things.
This fall, Startup Luminate helped Garnier advertise a new product called BB cream (Tangent: I know this is already a big deal in Asia and is getting bigger here, but I still have no clue WTF it is. Sometimes I refuse to learn what things are until absolutely necessary. Example: Skrillex.) by targeting images of "fresh-faced, beautiful women with clear skin" in "fashionable environments," the thought being, as anyone who has ever seen an advertisement already knows, that a lady with fab skin will convince other ladies to buy the products she's hawking.
Here's how it works hand in hand with humans:
Luminate indexes images from 7,000 publishers, including Yahoo and CBS. Initially, the technology throws out images where it detects porn, violence or hate speech. Then, it looks for women where the face takes up a big percentage of the page.
That's where the robots and algorithms stop and people come in. The next step — finding women with beautiful skin — is left up to Luminate's team of freelance screeners, which narrowed down 20 million images of women found by the software, 230,000 were considered "good look-a-likes" for the campaign.
"The software is not very good at telling you if they have beautiful skin; we use humans to validate that," Mr. Edwards said.
Garnier is welcome to use my super fashionable Instagram photos whenever they want. Here's one of a collage I made in 1999?
[Ad Age]