Publicis x YouScan

Sponsorships and marketing strategies are the driving force behind sports brands today. Understanding how they work is key to discovering what consumers need and how they behave towards their products. They're a way to get a realistic view of the audience turnout for each sport, what kind of engagement different sponsorship activities bring to their competitors, and whether there is any strong association between sports audiences and sports brands. Publicis stepped up to the plate to help a major sports brand decide if including sports sponsorship activities in their marketing strategies.

For this research, Publicis teamed up with YouScan – a social media intelligence platform with image recognition capabilities. Its visual insight technology allows users to analyze visual brand mentions and obtain advanced analytics thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. The platform identifies more than 1,000 scenes, objects, and activities along with demographic information to provide brands with in-depth analytics.

Using YouScan, Publicis analyzed 1.9 million images, targeting Twitter as one of the main sources with more than 150k images (mentions). Twitter is special because customers share their  unbiased opinions,  life moments, feedback and thoughts with the Twitter community, helping brands receive a comprehensive overview of consumer behavior. 

The agency used visual data as a foundation for this research and collected images featuring Nike, Adidas, Puma and Reebok logos in the US, UK, and Canada (coming from accounts with disclosed geo-location) over a two-month period (May-June 2022). 

From there, YouScan’s analysis showed that around 22% of the mentions did not contain a word or hashtag with the brand and only contained a visual representation – including the brand logo or the brand name spelled somewhere in the visual (text recognition).