How do you make something like Doritos-flavored vodka seem intriguing, even appealing? Beyond the actual taste or feel of a product, pictures sell, tell a story and ultimately determine how well items do on the market.
For decades, it’s been left up to photographers, art directors, marketing managers and others to ultimately pick the best photo to use for these campaigns. Photography is so essential to selling a product that 67 percent of consumers say that the quality of a product image is “very important” when selecting items, according to stats from MdgSolutions, a branding agency based in Miami. Additionally, 78 percent of online shoppers wanted to see a product as if it was part of their own daily lives.
After years of development, Jehan Hamedi’s newest venture, Vizit has leveraged predictive content analytics and AI to create synthetic audiences that can predict the effectiveness of art and photography for any consumer population in real time. Even Doritos Vodka.
Since launching the company in 2021, Vizit has attracted major clients like Mars, L’Oreal, Unilever and Lindt, who have used the company’s technology to build brand awareness and “transactional conversations.” Hamedi told Paste the company is currently working with Ghirardelli Chocolate Company to figure out which specific images create the most return from online customers.
“The findings not only influence the specific visuals selected for each product page, but also future content creation practices, what gets swapped for seasonal content, and more,” Hamedi said. In short, Vizit analyzes everything from a product’s style, colors, positioning and crop of a picture, delivering a report filled with consumer insights. Hamedi said Vizit is using A.I. to not only analyze content and deliver insights but to boost the predictive analytics field with it.
After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Boston University, Hamedi has risen through Boston’s AI-powered startup scene. At Crimson Hexagon, he served as Head of Growth and Innovation, before launching his own company, computational social science R&D lab Adhark, in 2014. As CEO and Head of Product, Jehan oversaw teams that developed text, network, and image-based analytics solutions for multiple Fortune 500 brands, leading to what would eventually become Vizit.
In January, the company unveiled a list of the top 200 leading brands and a live quantitative analysis of content across over 20 major consumer goods categories, including Beauty, Automotive, Petcare, Appliances and Grocery. The interactive product, dubbed Content Effectiveness Rankings, also lets brands and digital creators submit their own content and product listings for analysis to receive Vizit Scores.
In addition to more common analyses like eye-tracking, Vizit’s A.I. has unique audience-specific insights into what is or is not visually appealing. That gives companies a closer look at what kind of content is resonating with the average viewer as well as their target audience.
“We are replicating and measuring the emotional response,” Hamedi said. “The technology optimizes imagery in a way to provide creators with a tangible way to appeal and brands able to provide content that feels personalized and connected.”
Back to Doritos Vodka. The product launched in December of 2023, so Vizit ran an analysis to see how it would appeal to consumers based on the visual assets. Both high and lower-scoring carousel images offered interesting insights including the revelation that online alcohol shoppers “didn’t like images showing off the industrial production of the Doritos-flavored drink or images flaunting bulk portions of the beloved snack.”
Moving forward, Hamedi said he expects Vizit’s visual AI to move beyond static images into including video, so teams can walk away from an analysis knowing in a very fine-grained way what they need to do to improve imagery.
“Whereas we once may have been restricted to studying the preferences of broad swathes of consumers, now we have the power to hone in on even the most refined segments of our target audience,” he said.
Dana Forsythe is a freelance writer covering tech, comic books and culture. He lives in Massachusetts, enjoys photographing street art, collecting comics and can be followed via Twitter @danafour.