AI isn’t a new trend in marketing. Complex algorithms have been applied to budget allocation, task automation, and performance analysis before, but now this kind of tech is slowly but surely moving into the creative field of marketing.
This isn’t a small deal, and it’s going to change our careers forever. It will transform what it truly means to be a marketer.
Here’s everything you need to know about AI image and object recognition in marketing:
What Is AI Image Recognition?
In its basic definition, AI image recognition is a set of algorithms that have the ability to identify patterns in the images it analyzes on an individual pixel level. It can learn from those patterns and even improve its accuracy and speed in identifying them over time.
The AI requires training on billions of photos to learn all the possible elements of any image, photo, or video content. It ultimately leads to an instant ability to recognize objects in millions of images.
The implications of this are huge, especially for marketers.
How Is AI Image Recognition Used in Marketing?
The short answer is that it’s making the lives of marketers vastly easier, in part by speeding up the entire process of content ideation, creation, and simply getting good content ideas out to market.
And as a bonus, that’s all achieved with a layer of confidence that those ideas will actually vibe with the audience. Here are a few very practical applications of image recognition:
Visual Trend Recognition
Every marketer knows that hours go into content trend analysis every week, month, and quarter. It’s often the slowest part of the entire content creation process.
It’s also hardly ever backed by any real evidence that supports the content ideas brought to the table. As marketers, we often work on a hunch.
What 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.
The selection process that is usually driven by your gut feelings is replaced with AI’s ability to identify exactly what you’re looking for and pick out the best examples from the lot, examples that have already been tested and have been successful.
What’s important is what happens in the background of that search. While you as a marketer can only sift through maybe 100 to 200 posts and pick out ideas based on mere intuition, AI can pull the images or videos out of millions of examples and organize them based on specific trends.
Whether it’s a certain mood, color, scenery, or the objects featured in the images, it’s all organized for you instantly. It makes the ideation part of the workflow so much faster and adds a layer of data to guide your content decisions.
Logo Recognition
The implications of AI logo recognition in images are immense for brand marketers, especially when it comes to accurately measuring the effectiveness of sponsorship deals.
Currently, brand marketers are primarily measuring their sponsorship results based on surveys, statistical data provided by 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 you gained 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 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, and 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 or how to properly calculate it, but with AI this is a click-of-a-button process.
Interest Recognition
The end goal for all 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 use AI to find images 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 for our audiences.
It is no longer a process of endless guesswork until we narrow it down to an idea that, fingers-crossed, will work. It’s a synergy between the accuracy of AI and the creativity of a marketer.
What Does This Mean for Careers in Marketing?
Over the last decade, marketers have seen the required skillset to successfully do their jobs shift vastly. We went through a process of mapping attribution, developing the skills to read data (now essential to every marketer), and skills to apply data to strategy.
We’re now cautiously entering a different area, that of creativity. While it may take a second to let go of the practices and habits we’ve built over a long time in this area, there is little doubt that those creative marketers that are able to readily equip AI as part of their toolbox will not only be able to bring about the best ideas but likely skip miles ahead of what we thought possible creatively.
The Takeaway
It may be hard to believe, but this is only the start of a chapter. At least that’s what it looks like when we look at the Socialbakers roadmap ahead.
As AI becomes an underlying layer of assistance in every aspect of our marketing, from data analysis to content creation to customer care, we’ll see entire organizations transform. We may be starting to see a 4-day weekday ahead.Read more about how AI is used in marketing in our previous blog post.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
