Marketers Making Your Selfies Famous

_abc6765_1Be on the look out because your selfie might be an actual ad. Marketers are keeping an eye on people’s selfies for the use of advertisement with help from most used selfie social media networks: Instagram and Pinterest. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, some companies, such as Ditto Labs Inc., use software to scan photos to identify logos, whether the person in the image is smiling, and the scene’s context. Several more photo-mining startups are analyzing public selfies to help advertisers get new data.

Another service known as Piqora, similar to Ditto Labs Inc., stores numerous images on its servers just to identify trends passing the information to clients who may want to create new marketing campaigns. Up until now there is no law that forbids publicly available photos from being analyzed in bulk, meaning that there should be no problem with the social media networks nor the marketing firms, says AdWeek. Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 5.42.38 PM

Will this cause controversy with the public? Wall Street Journal says that Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr have informed users that publicly posted content might be shared with partners and take action when their rules are violated by outside developers. There would be no reason why this new marketing trend would be a problem.

So next time you post selfies or photos to your social media networks, think twice. You might be on the newest Bud Light ad without even knowing it.