Tumblr to let marketers scan blog photos for their brands
Tumblr has partnered with photo analytics company Ditto Labs which will use its technology to tap into the 130 million photos users share on the Yahoo-owned blogging platform each day to help marketers understand the visual conversations happening around their brands.
Ditto Labs has become a “firehose” partner of Tumblr, which means it now has access to a realtime stream of public Tumblr blog posts, reflags and “like” data.
A Tumblr spokeswoman declined to provide a comment to Marketing Week, but the site’s head of business development T.R. Newcomb told Mashable the partnership will not be extended beyond sentiment analysis at the moment.
Newcomb added: “Right now we’re not planning to do anything ad-related…if Coke wants to understand the nature of the conversation [about the brand on Tumblr] Ditto can sift through and deliver it to Coke.”
Brands including Gatorade, Harley Davidson and airline JetBlue have already used Ditto’s technology to discover how their products are used, find their influencers and measure their social ROI respectively, according to Ditto’s website.
Ditto’s partnership with Tumblr is also likely to help brands discover photos of their brands they may have missed through simple hashtag or text-based searches, analyse competitor trends and manage photo campaigns on the platform.
Yahoo bought Tumblr, which hosts more than 197 million blogs, for $1.1bn in May 2013.
Tumblr has slowly been evolving its advertising offer since 2012 to include a number of “sponsored” units, which Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt described to Marketing Week earlier this year as an opportunity for marketers to “take the storytelling canvas…to a completely new level”.
