Viewing is the new listening: How visual analytics

tools let us uncover the culture around a brand

Juan Isaza and Jose Gonzalez
Source: WARC Exclusive, March 2018
Downloaded from WARC

Asses the capabilities and limitations of Viewing, as well as its potential to enrich or complement
Listening-based research.

Social listening tools have made great strides in the past few years, allowing us to tap into public
conversations on Twitter, forums and blogs in order to deepen our understanding of consumer
attitudes and behaviors.
Social listening has over time proven to be a legitimate research tool with many real-world
applications and unique advantages.
However, newfound awareness of the limits of language-based listening models, combined with a
cultural shift towards communication platforms like Instagram, have led to the rise of image
recognition technology to facilitate a new form of ‘visual listening' – viewing.

Summary
Since 2010, when Ray Poynter famously announced the new era of research by declaring that "listening is the
new asking," brands and advertisers have begun to understand the power of consumer and cultural
understanding through social media platforms.1 Social listening tools have made great strides since then,
allowing us to tap into public conversations on Twitter, forums and blogs in order to deepen our understanding
of consumer attitudes and behaviors.

Initially dismissed by some as an empty marketing buzzword, ‘social listening’ has over time proven to be a
legitimate research tool with many real-world applications and unique advantages. But all forms of research
come with their own set of problems and limitations, and listening is no exception. Newfound awareness of the
inherent limits of language-based listening models, combined with a broader cultural shift towards
communication platforms like Instagram, have led to the rise of new social research tools that use image
recognition technology to facilitate a new form of ‘visual listening,’ which we call viewing.

This paper explores one such tool: Sysomos Visual Discover (formerly known as Gaze), an early pioneer in the
field and one of the most advanced tools available in the market today. Ultimately, the goal is to understand and
asses the capabilities and limitations of viewing, as well as its potential to enrich or complement listening-based
research.

The great migration: from words to images

With the increasing sophistication of tools such as Sysomos Search and Crimson Hexagon, we’ve begun to see
the unique advantages that listening has over more traditional research methods. When used correctly, these
tools give brands unprecedented power and flexibility to move at the speed of culture.

Over the last two years however, Twitter’s growth has slowed dramatically around the world and in much of
Latin America, as users began to migrate to other platforms that pioneered a more visual and aesthetically
appealing form of expression. Instagram in particular has grown at an astonishing rate: once seen primarily as a
quirky photo editor with built-in social features, it has now established a firm position as the second most popular
social network (after Facebook) across the world and throughout most of Latin America.2

A cursory glance at the company’s own official numbers provides some perspective on the network’s
unprecedented growth during the past year. By the end of 2016, six years after the service first launched,
Instagram had 600 million monthly active users and 300 million daily users. This was a significant achievement
for the platform, and more than enough to solidify its position as the world’s second most popular social network.

But as impressive as the numbers were in 2016, they pale in comparison to the platform’s dramatic growth
during the last year. By April 2017, Instagram had reached 700 million monthly active users, meaning that it
added an astonishing 100 million new users in just four months. Four months after that, the company added an
additional 100 million, reaching 800 million monthly active users and 500 million daily active users as of
September 2017.3

Simply put, Instagram has grown its user base by 160% year-on-year while retaining extremely high levels of
user engagement. Not only is this unprecedented among social media platforms, it also makes comparisons with
Twitter all but irrelevant,4 Twitter’s user base grew a disappointing 5% during the same period.

Indeed, Instagram’s only real competition nowadays is arguably its big brother, Facebook. Granted, it still has a
long way to go before catching up with Facebook in terms of raw user numbers. But when it comes to the
cultural power it exerts over the lives of teens and young adults in Latin America, it’s arguably far closer to
matching Facebook-levels of influence. In Argentina, for instance, Instagram’s penetration varies drastically
among different age groups. Only 30% of Argentinians aged 35+ use Instagram, making it the third largest social
network among that age group. Among the 25-34 age group, however, Instagram usage grows to 50%, easily
surpassing Twitter. Move to the 18-24 demographic and Instagram suddenly starts to look like a legitimate
Facebook rival, with 62% of the age group currently using the platform and no end in sight to its growth
potential.5

These changes in the social media landscape have made it more important than ever to develop tools that help
us identify insights beyond the written word, in images and videos. To be sure, language-based listening is still
incredibly useful, but it is no longer sufficient. Thus, to gain a deeper appreciation of our increasingly visual
culture, perhaps we need to go beyond listening and reframe our work as a viewing exercise.

This is the idea behind “visual listening” tools like Sysomos Visual Discover. Although far less sophisticated than
text-based tools, they are rapidly improving and can occasionally surprise us by revealing the non-verbal
insights that hide in the images people share.

Setup and initial impressions

To understand the real scope of these tools, we wanted to do an experiment with an iconic Puerto Rican beer
brand: Medalla Light. The flagship brand of Puerto Rico’s oldest and best-known brewery, Medalla Light has
been the top selling beer in the country for over a decade, with a current market share of about 35%.

Since its launch during the Pan American games in 1979, Medalla Light has positioned itself as the island’s
‘national’ beer, developing strong patriotic associations in the minds of consumers. Medalla’s use of iconic
Puerto Rican imagery and music in much of its advertising throughout the years makes the brand particularly
relevant to the kind of Viewing exercise that a tool such as Sysomos Visual Discover allows.

Our goal, then, is to understand the context, imagery, and situations that users associate with the brand through
the content they share with friends. Furthermore, we wanted to compare these findings with the kinds of images
that users share of one of Medalla’s up and coming competitors: Gasolina. A much younger brand, Gasolina
positions itself as an “urban drink” and ranks among the fastest growing alcoholic beverages in Puerto Rico in
recent years.

Setting up the tool is relatively easy: we simply had to ‘feed’ the relevant logos into Sysomos, so it could begin to
learn how to identify it in publicly shared Instagram photos. After that was done, it only took a couple of days
before we began to see all kinds of user-generated images featuring the brands. Seeing this in practice for the
first time is actually quite impressive: the tool produced results without having to search for any keyword, and
the accuracy of the image recognition was surprisingly precise. The tool would even catch images where the
logos were buried in the background, out of focus, or even partially obscured. Unlike a text-based search, where
users must explicitly mention the relevant keyword, visual analytics tools give us the sense that we are looking
at the brand’s context even when it appears on a photo seemingly by accident.
The tool also offers an impressive range of filtering options: it can establish the gender of the people who post
photos of the brand, the context in which it appears (eg, beach, food, pool, etc.) the time of day, whether the
photo includes a selfie and even whether someone is smiling in the picture. Granted, it’s performance in this
area is still not perfect – it frequently fails to identify or categorize certain types of photos and contexts – but the
tool is accurate enough to provide valuable insights that would otherwise remain undiscovered with a traditional
text-based tool.

What follows is a brief synthesis of the main findings obtained from a study of 600+ Instagram posts that
featured Medalla Light as well as over 200 photos depicting the competition.

Findings: Discovering the brand’s meaning through images

The first of several interesting findings, and one that reinforced much of what we knew about the brand, was its
social value at the moment of consumption. Compared to other alcoholic drinks and products associated with
parties, the images of Medalla Light were notable for its frequent and prominent role in group photos. Indeed, it
was striking to see how Medalla often became the protagonist of these images, with each member of the group
prominently displaying the brand for the camera. In contrast, a brand like Gasolina is often associated with
heavy drinking and personal indulgence, and the images reflected that: the brand appeared far less frequently,
and when it did appear, it was rarely featured prominently in the image. Medalla also featured far more
prominently in selfie images, suggesting the brand’s friendly or familial status in people’s lives. More than
alcohol, it is a brand that people are comfortable associating with themselves as individuals.
Second, the images that featured Medalla showed a clear link between the brand and the country. A common
and frequently recurring example of this are photos in which people attempt to artfully insert a bottle or can next
to the emblematic landscapes and monuments of Puerto Rico, such as its colonial architecture and famous
beaches. One of the most interesting findings was to see how people sought to express their version of the
brand’s value through images that clearly alluded to past and present advertising campaigns. Many users
accompanied these photos with old slogans that the brand hasn’t used in years; others crammed various
slogans from different periods in the brand’s history into a single post.

Analyzing how users repurpose the brand’s language next to their photos opens the door to a myriad of possible
insights about how users remember the brand, the kinds of messages that resonate with them, and the images
that come to mind when they recall past campaigns. The possibilities are endless and truly exciting. It’s easy to
imagine this kind of analysis becoming standard practice in the yearly planning process for any brand, or at least
those that have a long legacy of memorable advertising.

Third, the photographs captured by the tool revealed a strong presence of food (both traditional and generic
dishes) next to the product. Although Medalla has never sought to promote or “own” this territory, the photos
reveal a clear pattern and a potential opportunity for the brand. Unlike Gasolina, which has a far sweeter and
‘trendier’ flavor, Medalla Light is an approachable beer that can also work in a supporting role next to a tasty
meal. Its traditional taste may be less trendy than the competition’s fruity approach, but that’s precisely what
makes it more suitable for the dinner table. Visual listening allows us to see clear evidence of this fact, by
revealing a clear pattern that is almost completely absent from the competition’s photos.
Hashtags are the “other pictures”
As mentioned above, one of the most interesting discoveries in our initial attempts at "visual listening" came from
our analysis of the relationship between language and photos, especially what people say by means of
hashtags. The nuances, context or communities that people associate with are generally found in the hashtags
that adorn their photos. In Medalla’s case it is striking to see how people often used hashtags to transform
implicitly patriotic imagery into explicit calls to action: for instance, a picture of a Medalla Light can being held up
next to the Puerto Rican flag or an iconic statue has clear patriotic connotations, yet when this is combined with
a #PRSeLevanta hashtag (translated roughly as Puerto Rico Rising, which became a popular hashtag following
the disaster of Hurricane Maria) the image is transformed into an explicit call to action as well as a defiant
statement of resilience. Another common example for Medalla is the use of hashtags to subtly clarify where the
picture was taken: #Rincon, #OldSanJuan, and other such places are often used to provide the context where
the Medalla is being enjoyed, which provides researchers not only with geographic insights, but with the
emotional connotations that those places have for the consumer.

Conclusion
After spending a couple of weeks exploring the possibilities and implications of visual listening, we’re intrigued
by the new forms of research that it currently facilitates and remain optimistic about its potential to eventually
transform and improve upon existing social media research practices. While still too primitive to take the place of
linguistic analysis, visual analytics have already proven their value as a way to enrich social listening with new
kinds of insights. More specifically, viewing tools give researchers an entirely new perspective on the many
complex meanings and roles that brands play in people’s lives.

Of course, as is the case with text analysis, it’s important to note that one can’t simply expect the tool to produce
insights or organize 100% of the information by itself. The same lessons we’ve learned in years of experience
using text tools apply here as well: namely, that the most valuable insights don’t come from fancy charts or
filters, but from the mind of clever researchers who are willing to put in the time it takes to identify the kinds of
anomalies and patterns that eventually allow us to make new discoveries and formulate new hypotheses.

As visual analytics tools grow evermore powerful and sophisticated, we’ll get a better idea of the extent of their
impact on the ways in which we conduct research online. But considering how rapidly these tools keep
improving, it isn’t entirely crazy to assume that future social media researchers will spend more time viewing and
interpreting images than listening to conversations.

Sources
1. Poynter, Ray. The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and Techniques for Market
Researchers. Wiley, 2010

2. Dustin Sodano, Global Social Media StatPack: Platforms, Users and Devices, eMarketer Study, October
2017.

3. CNBC, Instagram says it now has 800 million users, up 100 million since April
4. Huddleston, T. (2017). Twitter Continues to Be a Disappointment on Wall Street.

5. Dustin Sodano, Global Social Media StatPack: Platforms, Users and Devices, eMarketer Study, October 2017

About the authors

Juan Isaza
Strategic Planning and Social Media VP, DDB Latina

Jose Gonzalez
Business Intelligence VP, DDB Puerto Rico

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