Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 3rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm

Happy 2011 to both digiterati and luddites. I spent the Holiday break trying to pretend I was not worried I'd be outblogged during this fallow period of the year.

Also during this time, two items caught my eye in the media.

First was that the last roll of Kodachrome got developed somewhere in the Midwest. R.I.P. the "nice, bright colors" (-Paul Simon).

Second was this, from the NYT:

"High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smartphones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly."

I remember joking, when Adobe acquired Omniture (the web analytics company out of Salt Lake City), we would soon be talking about tracking activity using Photoshop.

Suddenly this seems less funny.

The photographic image has reigned for nearly a century as the premiere non-motion communications vehicle in media and pop culture. For almost all of that time, it involved sophisticated analog processes that made an easy demarcation between those who dabbled in snapshots and those who were the upscale, sophisticated, bag-swinging, world-traveling Professional Photographers with their many lenses and meters and darkrooms.

Today of course, photography is that thing you do with your phone and Facebook.

The rate of change has been stupendous. In a decade we have gone from "digital can't match chemistry for quality" to "Koda-wha?". And with the digitization of photography comes certain new paradigms we must all learn to live with. One is the ubiquity of digital observation devices (aka cameras), and the other is the Real Reason This is Important (and predictably enough given my professional focus): analytics.

Can marketers turn this into a boon for their organizations? And if so, how?

Let me put on my Futurist hat.

While many large companies today continue to struggle (incredibly) with the basics of web analytics, there will always be those who can move beyond the rest and learn more about their customers by mining the rich, deep data that can be collected from anything digital. Many of these companies will want to perform analytics not just on user behavior but on digital photography.

Let me pose a practical example. Let's say your company has a Facebook page. And let's say it encourages uploads of photographs. Then let's say your analytics team is able to apply some of these emerging "scrutinization" technologies to examine the photographs. How much could be gained by mapping facial images with a database of emotions, then matching that to the product and how it is positioned against these? How much more could be gained by mapping actual users' facial images as the team tries to visualize their composite "customer" in order to build a relationship with that person? What would it say about the type of facial image used in an advertisement, or in the type of language associated with the type of facial prototype not just out of agency surmise, but created impartially out of the mass of photographic analysis data?

One more example: what if there were a portion of the public that would agree to be visible in a video while they used a web site; what if that were a condition of signing in to certain valuable content? What if that were made to seem "fascinating" to a certain type of user (with an appropriate value exchange)? The intelligence a marketer could gather via this method would seem to be invaluable.

We already know that digital photography got its shot at dominance not because it was at the outset superior to analog (it was vastly inferior); but because it was much easier and much cheaper to manipulate. Now the play of pixels and algorithms takes us one more valley deeper into the analytical frontier, to a place where the high-flying analog photography of yore could never have tread: marketers will soon have the ability to analyze photographs using algorithms, just as we now have the ability to analyze collected data about on line behavior using algorithms.

Sure, 2011 may be the year of the tablet as they say (more likely it will be about the iPad again); but beyond 2011, marketers can look forward to the ability to deploy digital analytics tools against "soft" targets like photographs; and our analytical world, aided by more mapping and more machine intelligence, will take yet another leap in sophistication and opportunity.

How long will it really be until a Photoshop plug-in allows you to deploy analytics on photographs?

Perhaps less time than I would have thought even a few months ago.