That photo you posted on Instagram may be used in a company’s Facebook advertisement…with your permission of course.
Since the dawning of social media, major brands have taken advantage of the various user-generated content, and have incorporated photos and videos into their marketing campaigns. Now, due to a new algorithm, brands can find and use the best social media pictures optimized by performance.
Olapic, a social marketing platform, is generating serious buzz after it launched its new service called Predictive Consumer Generated Ads. This technology crawls social media for pictures on Instagram, Twitter, Vine and YouTube that are projected to perform the best when it’s sponsored on Facebook for advertising purposes.
The startup’s technology peruses the vast library of photos individuals are publishing on the wide spectrum of social networks. Olapic then initiates an algorithm – Photo Rank – to determine which photos are most likely to influence and prompt users to click on the ad; the images usually contain the brand’s products in some way. Once the image is chosen, the picture’s copyright holder is contacted by Olapic and is asked for their explicit consent to place these photos in ads.
“We’ve been collecting more than 40 million pictures during the past two years and analyzing how people engage with them,” said Pau Sabria, co-founder and CEO of Olapic, in an interview with MediaPost. “We built an algorithm that knows what’s in the picture that makes people click or buy.”
With such an immense selection of images, it wouldn’t be too difficult to select photos that adhere to the social network juggernaut’s recommended 1200x628px – other sizes include 470×246 (desktop), 560×292 (mobile) and 254×133 (sidebar).
Many brands have started to incorporate this tool into their marketing schemes, including Calvin Klein, Coach, Lancome Paris, JetBlue and West Elm – the latter has garnered media attention for attempting to coalesce targeted pictures with their own specific ad campaigns.
It looks like user-generated content has entered the marketing fold once again. One of the latest campaigns containing this type of content is Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6,” which showcases artistic and glamorous photos shot by these smartphone owners on billboards, bus shelter posters and online.
The service being rendered by Olapic could act as an aid for brands and marketers because it establishes one of the key principles of modern day marketing: engagement.
First, consumers really enjoy user-generated content because it suggests true authenticity, even more so than a news article. Second, user-generated content is a lot more affordable than conventional marketing (press release writers, in-house content developers, etc.). Third, user-generated content enhances social SEO, especially with the latest updates to Google’s Panda and Penguin.
Olapic isn’t exactly conjuring up an inventive concept because other startups, like Chute for example, have established businesses based on this same idea, but in different ways. With that being said, brands need a lot of help to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape, and citizens around the world are there to help…whether they know it or not.
