Zach Cox seems about as even-keeled as they come, a man not prone to hyperbole. So last month when I interviewed Cox, the Des Moines-based co-founder of Pongr, for a feature story and he mentioned the promising prospects of a product called ImagePulse, I took note.
ImagePulse is a tool that provides photo-based sentiment analysis for brands by combing social networks for images rather than words. So, for instance, where other platforms can pick up on a tweet that contains the words “Coca-Cola,” ImagePulse can recognize an Instagram containing a Coca-Cola bottle. ImagePulse uses that image-recognition capability to find brands in photos and produce media reports on when those photos are being shared and who’s sharing them. Each photo is then given a Purchase Intent Score based on an additional layer of text analysis for “buying” words.
ImagePulse is the result of internal research and development by Pongr, which created the tool to help measure market information for its own image-recognition and gaming products.
“We mainly wanted to just start monitoring things and see what’s out there,” Cox said. “There’s a lot, and it’s really been just completely untapped.”
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As Pongr has found, plenty of companies are interested in tapping into that information. That became abundantly evident when Pongr shared some of its early findings with clients.
“They started expressing a lot of interest in it,” said Jamie Thompson, another Pongr co-founder. “So we figured there was a good opportunity to actually productize it and license it and sell it as its own standalone product.”
The company hopes that, though Image Pulse is a standalone, subscription product, it will help make clients aware of the prevalence of photo-sharing involving brands and lead them to use other Pongr products. In an interview July 8, Thompson said Pongr was in talks to launch a pilot version of ImagePulse with a few “global 50 brands.”
“I think we’re getting close,” Thompson said. “I’ve got my fingers crossed that in the next few weeks, by the end of the summer for sure, we intend (to) fully launch with a few of the brand partners.”
Cox and Thompson both say ImagePulse offers users capabilities not available in any other product on the market today, and Pongr hopes to capitalize on that.
“There are a number of great social media monitoring companies out there, but all of them rely mostly on text-based analysis,” Thompson said. “This is the first ever visual sentiment analysis engine that is, you know, scaling across millions and millions and potentially billions of brand-related photos and brand-related expressions coming directly from consumers.”
For more on Image Pulse, see the video below.
Video from PongrMedia on YouTube.
