Bolthouse Farms – Instagram Recognition Campaign

We’re very interested in experiences which transcend boundaries of time and place. Experiences which exist across multiple domains but still somehow feel like a unified and consistent effort. In 2013, far before augmented reality or computer vision was accessible to the public, in partnership with Wildlife.la, Tiny Rebellion, Bolthouse Farms, and Instagram, we began exploring how social platforms might enable these sorts of distributed interaction.

Bolthouse Farms customers love to share their love for the brand. They snap pictures of the juice bottles and post them all over Instagram, using the images as excuses to discuss their passion for the product. To take advantage of this discussion and reward the loyal customers, we created a web application which enables those Instagram users to opt-in to our campaign via a hashtag.

First, we analyze the tagged images and match them against Bolthouse logos using computer vision. If the image matches, then we let the user know via a comment on the image, and share a secret URL they can follow to grab a Bolthouse coupon as a reward. If the image doesn’t match, we send the image to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where a human determines if the Bolthouse logo is present in the image. The result is a near-perfectly accurate evaluation of whether the image matches the desired criteria. If so, then we post the comment with the secret URL, if not, we comment on the user’s image letting them know that they’ll need to post another image featuring the logo to get a coupon.

Here’s a screenshot of an un-styled screen from the campaign management tool:

Our management tool allows us to screen the users and images included in the campaign. To detect trends in posting and to track metrics on the unfolding interactions. These metrics have shown us that the project has been a success. At the time of this posting we’re sporting more than 12,600 users, and more than 14,500 images.
For more info on the project, here’s some press:

mediapoast.com
mobilemarketer.com
prnewswire.com