The Canadian Behind Bluefin Labs’ Incredible Social TV Analytics

By: Kuljit Grewal  |   July 16th, 2012   |   Business, News, O Canada, Social Media

For those who have never heard of Bluefin Labs, there is no need to feel bad, you will soon enough whether here or somewhere else. The firm is at the forefront on what is truly a phenomenon that is unique to our current generation; the analysis of social media activity and viewer engagement during televised events, shows and most importantly the commercials.

 

In a similar fashion to many great innovations, Bluefin began as something with a totally different purpose thanks to a Canadian-born Waterloo and MIT graduate named Deb Roy. The Canuck of Indian descent co-created the technology Bluefin uses to capture and sort a large volume of social media activity in order to capture the process involved in children learning to speak. Deb’s own son played the subject and with cameras and audio equipment set up around their home, he and his team were able to capture 90,000 hours of activity. The problem then became how to sort that volume of footage in order to key in on his son’s learning. The solution for this finally came in the way of machine learning systems that continually train and re-train various complex algorithms to extract data.

 

Deb and his team quickly saw the potential that this technology could have on advertising analytics, particularly in the emerging and influential world of social networking.  Bluefin provides audience engagement measures and various analytics to a plethora of brands, advertising agencies and TV networks that rely on this information to tweak advertising and programming based on the thousands to millions of social media comments and posts. Quite simply, the technology measures how many people are talking about TV. At its core, it provides invaluable information to advertisers and networks who gain an insight into their actual target audience based on chatter as well as how they feel about the ads and programming they consume.

 

The very fact that the resources required to gather, sort and analyse this information is unique to Bluefin make them a company whose profile is increasing rapidly. Consider the fact that they will play a large role in the U.S. Presidential election and 2012 Summer Olympics as further proof of their immense value in today’s world. Included below is some analysis conducted on February’s NFL Super Bowl.