#IIeX Focus Series – Technology & Market Research (3 of 5): Photo & Video

By Phil Rance

Photo and video: an untapped goldmine

Partly as a consequence of the explosion of mobile devices and social media, and also the increasing availability of cheap bandwidth and storage, there is also an explosion in photographic and video content. As individuals, we have become used to carrying a networked video camera in our pockets at all times, We barely think about it, although it would have sounded ridiculous ten years ago as we had barely started to adopt digital cameras.

Quick and easy photo sharing has fuelled the social media boom, with photo sharing becoming a killer app for social media sites – so much so that Facebook had to acquire rival Instagram in April 2012.

The next battle ground is video, which most social networks already offer, but are looking for ways to make more usable and accessible. Twitter recently launched Vine offering the video equivalent of 140 characters, and Google are more closely integrating YouTube and Google+ to the extent that we may find they have “won” social video without us noticing.

While it is easy to dismiss the impact of all this as being manifested mainly as cat photos and video pranks, social photo and video have already had disruptive impact for television news, for the entertainment industry, and for law enforcement, as well as for the photographic industry itself, most spectacularly with Kodak’s bankruptcy in 2012.

The market research potential of all this has barely been scratched, partly because the unstructured nature of photo and video data makes it hard to analyse. If social media research is “qualitative on a quantitative scale”, then photo and video may be “ethnography on a quantitative scale”. Some pioneers like Big Sofa are carving out a niche in gathering, analysing and distributing searchable video content for market research purposes, and expanding the definition of what market research can deliver in the process.