Bluefin Labs Unveils Initiatives That Create the Key Link between TV and Social Media

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bluefin Labs, a technology company grounded in cognitive science research, announced today that it has begun pilot testing initiatives that for the first time provide an actionable, key link between TV and social media. Bluefin Labs’ semantic technology interprets audience responses and intelligently pinpoints what people are reacting to – down to specific scenes, characters or even certain words that are used. Through partnerships designed to unearth and act upon insights from this quickly evolving area of marketing science, the company is in testing with top brand advertisers, agencies and content providers. Participants include: Best Buy Co., Inc., Mars, Humana, Razorfish, SS+K, Hill Holliday, Dentsu and FOX Sports.

“We see the value of Bluefin Labs data, demonstrating how consumers respond to media, through the very technology we help them use in their lives.”

“With the combination of science and large-scale computing, we are solving a problem that has eluded TV for more than 60 years: how to measure actual audience engagement and not just simple media consumption,” said Deb Roy, founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs. “Marketers and TV networks are looking to us to understand how their audiences are responding to ads and shows on TV, and we are able to provide them with data in near real time.”

Bluefin Labs is able to demonstrate exactly how TV shows and commercials directly affect audience response, sentiment and intent. Marketers can therefore use Bluefin data to understand audience engagement with TV ads. Furthermore, the data provides them a view into which TV networks – even which specific TV shows – garner the highest levels of audience engagement via social media response, thus enabling more sophisticated decision-making throughout the advertising lifecycle.

“As we strive to create the best experiences for our customers, we will constantly seek out and experiment with new ways to gather meaningful feedback on our conversations with them,” said Neil McPhail, senior vice president, new business customer solutions group, Best Buy. “We see the value of Bluefin Labs data, demonstrating how consumers respond to media, through the very technology we help them use in their lives.”

"The legacy of Razorfish has been to continually innovate and experiment with new technologies in the media space,” said Bob Lord, CEO, Razorfish. “As such, we’re impressed by the technology that Bluefin Labs has developed and the potential impact it could have, bridging the current broadcast system and evolving social graph. We absolutely agree that providing better feedback about content and programming in ‘real-time’ will increase brand engagement and allow the agency to build more impactful programs for our clients."

Today, the Bluefin technology platform has a view into over 3 billion public-facing social media comments each month, tied to a continuously growing video fingerprint archive of over 200,000 distinct TV show and commercial airings. Bluefin ingests and video fingerprints of 43 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks currently, with plans to achieve full coverage of all shows and commercials in the national market by early 2012.

Officially launched in February 2011, Bluefin has entered into a period of accelerated growth in terms of partnerships as well as hiring. Most recently, Tom Thai joined Bluefin as vice president of marketing and business development. Thai led marketing teams at Google and CBS Interactive, and most recently was vice president of strategic development at AOL. Additionally, Anjali Midha joined the team as director of customer insights. Prior to Bluefin, Midha served as vice president of strategy and analysis at Digitas, a digital marketing agency.

Bluefin will debut the general availability of its first product in summer of 2011, when the current pilot period concludes. The product will provide advertisers and agencies with an automated and scalable platform for deriving insights from the interplay between TV broadcasts and social media response.

About Bluefin Labs

Bluefin Labs is applying science and large scale computing to solve a problem that has eluded the TV industry for more than 60 years: how to close the audience feedback loop of TV mass media. Bluefin’s technology and data enable marketers and TV content producers, for the first time, to tap into data at scale that link people’s social media commentary to the shows and commercials they watch on TV. Grounded in 15 years of cognitive science and machine learning research at the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. For more about Bluefin, visit www.bluefinlabs.com.