Brand Photos: Behind the Lens of Image Recognition

The Evolving Mobile Revolution and the Rebirth of Public Pay Phones?

Advertising, Mobile Marketing | March 18, 2013 by Darren

The Future of Pay Phones — New York City’s daring dive into public mobile phones began with its Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge.

As Wired Magazine puts it, giant public iPhones are about to invade the streets of Manhattan.

Public access to social media and the digital highway was on the forefront of New York City’s agenda when its Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications launched its Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge last December. The contracts for the city’s 11,000-plus pay phone expires in 2014, leaving a wide-open opportunity for an enterprising company looking to breathe life into a dying medium.

According to Wired, there are less than 500,000 pay phones left in the USA — and my personal experience says half of them are broken or coated in grime — compared to 327 million-plus active mobile phones in this country.

The contest winner, “NYFi” (pictured above) was picked this month out of 125 submissions. Proposed by Sage and Coombe Architects, the Pay Phone of the Future combines a phone with a subway and bus fare kiosk to reduce street clutter. On its huge TV-like touch-screen, there are apps that would let you call a cab or find a restaurant. Expect a few photo sharing apps to be sure.

New York City is not committed to adopting the design. Officials said they were trying to spark a conversation about what communication tools should be made available in a public fashion.

Humorist Art Buchwald as Superman, who famously changed his civilian journalist clothes in the semi-privacy of a glass phone booth.

If you are younger than 30, odds are high that you’ve never used a pay phone, let alone an old-fashioned phone booth, which seems as dated as the record player. The death of the phone booth might not have affected our day to day lives, but the impact on pop culture has been brutal. Superman, of course, used them to seamlessly change himself from and back to mild-mannered journalist Clark Kent.

In the movies, journalists got all their anonymous tips at pay phones. And master criminals would taunt the police from them. Let’s not forget all those dramatic rainy scenes in John Cusack movies in which his character is heartbroken trying to win back the girl who left him. Sorry, boombox. The pay phone is the secret behind Cusack’s romantic appeal.

The creepy ghosts of yesterday’s ubiquitous pay phones are a reminder that technology stops for no one.

What’s a Dial Phone? Despite the popularity of the Fisher Price retro pull-toy phone with nostalgic hipster parents, this version of the telephone seems as distant as Alexander Graham Bell.

As Pongr continues to develop the computer vision and artificial intelligence behind the advertising world’s best photo-sharing platform for brands, it’s a lesson we keep reminding ourselves.

(What would YOU like to see in a public smartphone kiosk? Drop us a line on the Pongr Facebook page!)

Everything in one, all in your pocket

Advertising, Brand Ambassadors, Mobile Marketing, Social Media | October 9, 2012 by Amy

The new Apple iPhone 5 in black and slate.

There’s a new kid in town: the iPhone 5. The newly added features have people talking and more excited than ever. Among the many features, we’re most excited about the enhanced mobile camera. Now with the iPhone 5, you can take higher-resolution photos, photos in darker areas, and panoramic photos without a separate application. Apple even integrated a function that allows photos to be shared on Facebook directly without launching the app. The screen is 176 pixels taller, so you can see even more. With a metal back instead of glass, the durability of the iPhone 5 enables mobile phone photographers to take pictures with less fear of the heartbreaking drop-and-shatter.

Smartphones, like the iPhone 5, have freed the public of carrying around different digital devices and combined it to one, making everything mobile. Now it’s even lighter to carry around. For any smartphone, each upgrade presents a camera with higher definition. Why are companies so focused on enhancing the camera function on a mobile phone?

With all the fast-paced changes in the world, people don’t have the time or patience to carry around a phone and a camera in their pocket. Now with all the mobile applications and social media platforms, photos have become such a big part of everyone’s life. Photos can show a perfect day or years and years of memories. In order to capture that moment, people need a good camera in hand. Nowadays, the quality of camera phone photos are good enough to even frame on walls. The public needed something that could make photo-taking convenient and smartphones have achieved just that.

For those of you who have smartphones or camera phones, we want to invite all of our users to face the mirror with your phone, tag the brand and share them on www.pongr.com. We want to see the ones responsible for all those wonderful photos on Pongr!

Pongr Fashion Week… With Style

Brand Loyalty, Recent, Social Media | September 6, 2012 by Amy

As we welcome fall, New York welcomes worldwide fashionistas to 9 fabulous days of celebrating the brands that help the world play dress-up everyday. From the 5th to the 13th, Fashion Week will attract the world’s attention, but is known to be an exclusive engagement among the people who are well-known in the field.

The expansion of the Internet and social media has brought out a surprising number of creative individuals who love fashion and are known for their unique style. Many people show their love for fashion and New York’s Fashion Week through blog posts, pins and videos.

A case study of New Zealand’s Fashion Week found that 70% of the attendees first heard about the event through social media platforms, according to Mark Carbone. Carbone also states that there was up to 22,000 people who actively engaged in social media even 2 weeks before Fashion Week started.

Photos bring together those who are near and far, no matter where they are. It’s not just among people; people can also connect with brands through photos. This interaction with consumers will not only promote the events throughout Fashion Week, but also increase future business relationships.

Now, imagine Fashion Week extending to Boston, Chicago or even Shanghai.

Brands should maximize the value of consumer behavior by inviting them to engage with photos of their favorite brands. This would deepen the relationship with consumers and even broaden the stage of Fashion Week. Pongr would provide the perfect platform of making Fashion Week a nationwide and furthermore, a worldwide event.

What are some must-have items for this fall? Snap a photo of your favorite brand or item and share it with us! We invite you to Fashion Week, Pongr style.

Embracing Visual Social Media

Brand Loyalty, Mobile Marketing, Social Media | August 30, 2012 by Connor

In a recent article for Fast Company, Ekaterina Walter took note of something we’ve been talking about for quite a while now. Social media has become increasingly visual, with photos taking center-stage as the most shared and most talked about form of content. This trend is more than just a passing fad, and brands need to make photos an integral part of their marketing strategies. As Walter puts it, “pictures have become one of our default modes of sorting and understanding the vast amounts of information we’re exposed to every day.”

The prominence of images makes total sense in the evolution of social media. Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University, points out that it all started with blogs, the earliest form of social networking online. “When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter,” he says. “Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication.”

It’s easy to take high-resolution photos with a mobile device, and photos are very popular on social media sites.

Walter notes that this move towards visual social media has to do with our overwhelming preference for mobile devices. Some studies have placed the percentage of people in the U.S. who access the Internet using their mobile handsets as high as 78%, in comparison to only 68% using a desktop or laptop computer. With mobile phone camera resolutions getting better and better, it’s much easier to snap a photo and post it to a social profile than to “[type] out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.”

This strong affinity for visual media among consumers makes the path clear for brands in terms of marketing. Encouraging users to take and submit their own photos is both a fun way to get consumers engaged with the brand as well as a useful way for brands to collect valuable earned media that can be used for marketing purposes on social media and beyond. Photo contests foster creativity and self-expression and help consumers to develop a strong, lasting relationship with the brand.

The crucial takeaway from an article like Walter’s is that this is an important trend that isn’t going away anytime soon. Brands need to embrace their customers’ fascination with images and incorporate photos into marketing strategies. Walter concludes her article by asserting that “brands that can rock visual media will find themselves market leaders.” We couldn’t agree more.

Pongr Makes Marketing Personal

Brand Loyalty, Social Media | August 22, 2012 by Connor

Technology has made it easier than ever for people to connect. Brands need to take advantage of the tools at hand to build relationships with consumers.

Technology connects people every day. Fifteen years ago, we would have had to pay exorbitant long distance rates to talk to a cousin across the pond, but now he’s just a click away. We’ve embraced tech for personal use and connecting with friends and family, but in many ways, interacting with brands and companies still feels a bit like the dark ages.

According to a recent study by Empathica, Inc., 62% of those polled thought brands didn’t sufficiently monitor and participate in online conversations. Too many brands establish profiles on social media sites only to not take advantage of the full interactive power of these networks.

Engaging with consumers doesn’t mean just answering questions posted to the brand’s Facebook Timeline or responding to Tweets. The key is making fans feel special, like they’re more than just a number. Every consumer has a unique relationship with the brand, and the way the brand interacts with them should reflect that.

Pongr’s photo response marketing platform offers brands an unprecedented opportunity to get to know their fans. Photos can tell you a lot about a person—not to mention all the valuable data that is collected when fans participate in photo contests, such as their location, demographic group, and brand photo history. This information gives brands who’ve enabled Photo Response Marketing an advantage when reaching out and making genuine, personal connections with their customers.

Promotions and special offers are great, but why not send your customers only the deals that are most relevant to them and that they’re most likely to enjoy? In essence, Pongr’s platform makes personal connections scalable. Even a large company can send customers individually tailored content. Social media is just that—social. New technology can not only connect people across the globe, but it can also give brands a chance to connect with their customers like never before and build lasting relationships that translate into brand loyalty.

The New Face of Marketing

Brand Ambassadors, Mobile Marketing, Shopper Marketing, Social Media | August 16, 2012 by Connor

In a recent article for the Harvard Business Review, Bill Lee makes the claim that traditional marketing is dead. It’s quite a proclamation, and he backs it up with several studies that confirm things like the relative lack of influence traditional marketing has on buyers’ decisions, as well as the apparent disillusionment of many CEOs with traditional marketing spending versus sales results. We still think traditional marketing has its place, but tight integration with newer, more social marketing tactics is definitely the future.

Lee posits that what may be creeping in to replace traditional marketing is a return to what he calls “community marketing”—companies empowering brand advocates to promote the product using social channels. For consumers, this “approximate[s] the experience of buying in their local, physical communities,” by applying the trust inherent in social networks to buying decisions. Community marketing is good for brands, because it makes the search for influencers easier. What better place to look for people to promote and advocate for your product than among people who already use and like the product?

Lee also argues that in exchange for helping promote the brand, consumers should be rewarded not with cash prizes or other similar incentives, but with social capital. By allowing brand enthusiasts to build trust and authority within their social network through promoting the brand, companies appeal to our desire to belong to a community and be recognized in that community.

Although he doesn’t know it, Lee is describing all the best things about photo response marketing. User-generated content is the most authentic and compelling form of content. Photos, too, are especially attractive and appeal to our universal human desire for authenticity and self-expression. Pongr’s platform lets brands empower their customers to create compelling original content to express their relationship with the brand. Our one-click sharing capabilities give users the opportunity to spread their content throughout their social networks, helping their influence to reach places traditional marketing never could.

Even if, like us, you believe traditional marketing still has a place, there’s no denying that integrating traditional with social marketing has become an essential part of running a business. Investing in new media marketing strategies is no longer a choice—it’s a requirement. According to a recent survey by Empathica, 62% of consumers feel brands are not participating sufficiently in online conversations. It’s time for brands to give consumers what they want and take advantage of the power of community marketing by enabling brand enthusiasts to promote the brand through social photos.

Natural Brand Engagement with Social Photo Marketing

Advertising, Social Media | August 6, 2012 by Connor

Open up your favorite social networking site and you probably won’t have to go far before you notice something that didn’t exist not so long ago: native ads. Native ads are ads that appear tightly integrated into a site’s content and presentation, in contrast to the intrusive ads that interrupt our videos or show up as a big ugly box on the side of the screen. The two social media bigwigs, Facebook and Twitter, have both started implementing native ads, which they’re calling Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets, respectively. But plenty of other sites are also giving advertisers native options for their placement, including YouTube, Tumblr, Yelp, and those purveyors of silly photos of cats with grammar problems, ICanHazCheezburger.com.

In some ways, this is coming full circle for advertising, harkening back to television shows in the 50s and 60s that included sponsor’s names as part of the show. It’s a move that makes sense for advertisers. As Dan Greenberg, CEO of Sharethrough, says, consumers are “tired of being interrupted, bothered, and ‘marketed at.’” The shift towards native ads allows consumers to see branded content naturally and transparently, just like they see content from their friends and people they follow.

Photos shared on social networks strike consumers as more authentic and will easily spark conversation.

At Pongr, we love this trend towards more natural, less intrusive advertising. Our Photo Response Marketing (PRM) can take it a step further, though. Rather than placing advertising alongside content from users’ friends, why not make the content from users’ friends your advertising? User-generated content will consistently be perceived as the most authentic, and it appeals to our universal human desire for self-expression. By encouraging consumers to take photos of your brand and then share those photos to their social networks, you will expose consumers to your brand organically.

As times changes, it’s important to be able to adapt to new trends and preferences. We’ve already talked about how shoppers are anxious to blend their digital life with in-store experiences. Using social photo marketing is a great way to blend social life with consumer life by allowing the conversation around your brand to develop naturally through shared photos. Pongr’s platform makes this simple with one-click sharing to Facebook or Twitter.

Go beyond Sponsored Stories or Promoted Tweets. Let consumers interact with your brand in the most natural way possible—through social photo marketing. Contact Pongr to find out more.

Photos Make Social Media Social Again

Brand Ambassadors, Social Media | June 28, 2012 by Connor

Brands—how much do you know about your Facebook fans? I mean, really know? You know how many you have, you can see how and when they interact with your content, but what else can you say about your fans? How many use your product on a daily basis, or how many wish they could? Which ones clicked “like” on your page two years ago and then forgot about you entirely, and which ones remain devoted brand enthusiasts who proudly advocate for your brand and spread word of mouth via their own personal profiles?

Chances are, most brands can’t answer these questions. A new like or follow doesn’t tell brands much about the users themselves, and this makes it very challenging to engage with fans on the personal, one-to-one level that social media promises. As a result, lots of brands have resorted to simply blasting their message on Facebook and Twitter, and they’re a bit lost when it comes to personalized, individual engagement with fans.

Victoria Ransom points out this challenge in her latest blog post for AdAge today. She proposes that brands need to implement systems to aggregate and analyze social data in order to be able to create highly personalized interactions with consumers. Of course, this is exactly what makes Pongr’s photo response management tools so great.

Our Love (of Photos) Is Here to Stay

Brand Loyalty, Mobile Marketing, Social Media | June 11, 2012 by Connor

Sometimes you crave numbers and statistics more than even a juicy hamburger.

Just like you get cravings for food, sometimes you just gotta have some numbers and raw data. We know—we hear you. So how’s this for some numbers for you? More than 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, and an estimated 70% of all activity on the site revolves around photos. Want some more? Photo-sharing site Pinterest, launched in March 2010, hit 11 million unique visitors in January 2012—the fastest site to ever break the 10 million mark. By the end of 2011, Pinterest users were uploading photos at a rate of 60 photos per second. More, you say? Ten percent of all photos ever taken by mankind were taken in the last 12 months.

Obviously, we don’t go around listing off photo-sharing statistics for our health. The point we’re trying to make is this: numbers this dramatic mean our current obsession with photos is not just a passing fad. We live in a visual world, there’s no doubt about that. The question that needs to be asked is, what are brands going to do about this?

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