Dive Brief: 

• Marketing firms like Ditto Labs and Piqora are mining selfies for new marketing and advertising data. 
• The firms access public photos through an API to help identify trends that can assist targeted campaigns. 
• The photo scanning process can also identify logos, for instance a Coke can in a photo, and assess the context of the photo—like whether the person is smiling. 

Dive Insight:

As social media and digital communication becomes increasingly visual, marketers need to have a system to identify trends outside of text. The marketing firms that have technology to extract valuable data from public photos will stand out from the pack, and will continue to benefit as the technology becomes more advanced. As long as privacy concerns are kept in mind, photo mining will likely prove critical to digital marketing in the future.