There is a treasure trove of untapped marketing potential in travel user generated content (UGC) for both publishers and advertisers. The key to accessing it is effective classification. When classified in the right way, travel UGC presents publishers with a golden monetisation opportunity, while making it easier for brands to target their advertising.
No longer do holidaymakers wait until they return home to develop the snaps they’ve taken on their disposable cameras, now they post them in real-time via their mobile or laptop straight to their favourite social media channels. In fact, a new infographic released this week from Stackla [see more below] highlighted that, as of June 2015, more than 47 million #travel photos have been posted to Instagram alone.
The good news for brands is that 40% of millennials rely specifically on this sort of content to inform their future travel plans.
Herein lies the advertising opportunity. If this content can be accurately classified, it can be sold to brands as a key advertising opportunity, allowing them to target their ads to the subject of the image. Up until recently, only contextual data could be used to classify a picture based on the text around it. But this can be hit and miss, creating the danger of ads being placed alongside inappropriate images.
However, it’s now possible to realise the full value of travel UGC using image recognition technology, which accurately analyses the image itself and can turn it into valuable data. The secret to correct identification and classification lies in the technology’s use of neural networks, which have the ability to recognise key characteristics contained within each image.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, so implementing an image classification solution offers the ability to translate that visual content into text. This means that publishers and platforms can maximise the revenue potential of travel UGC by trading it, safe in the knowledge that brands will be able to target their ads accurately. It also delivers an effective new advertising opportunity for brands.
For example, if someone uploads a family shot standing on a beach, in front of their rented holiday jeep, the taxonomy relating to that wouldn’t just recognise the family, but also the fact they are standing on a beach and next to a 4×4 vehicle, thus presenting a more complete description of the image.
The web is becoming increasingly visual. Many ad technologies fail in such an environment as they are unable to determine the content of an image or video due to the lack of descriptive meta data.
Travel UGC can be a goldmine, but only if you can leverage it in the right way. There is a huge opportunity for websites, platforms and hosting companies to monetise and understand their consumers better by turning these photos into new data points and it will be interesting to see how companies like SnapChat, WPP and Daily Mail’s new venture Truffle Pig will embrace and leverage visual targeting.
By Adrian Moxley, Co-Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at WeSEE
Originally posted Cream Global 20 July 2015