Last year, the National Basketball Association implemented a decision to allow sponsors to place small logo patches on player uniforms. It was the first time that the NBA had permitted jersey advertising, and it led to a key question: How would sponsors know whether their advertising investment was worth the multi-million-dollar cost?

One company recently provided an answer. According to GumGum inc., the ad placed by The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. on the uniforms of the Cleveland Cavaliers generated $3.4 million in value from social media exposure alone during the first half of the season (which began in October). And the company knew that because it used applied computer vision technology to thoroughly analyze broadcast and social media content for placement, exposure and duration involving Goodyear images that appeared in online or TV-generated NBA content.

“We were doing computer vision before computer vision was sexy,” said Brian Kim (pictured), senior vice president of product at GumGum. “We focus on building algorithms that allow computers to identify what’s happening in imagery.”

Kim spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, as part of theCUBE’s Western Digital “Data Makes Possible” CUBE Conversation series. They discussed GumGum’s computer vision approach for advertising and its recently formed business to track sports media content. (* Disclosure below.)

High impact, less intrusive advertising

Founded in 2008, GumGum built its business around an approach that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to create display ads within images that are relevant to the content on the webpage. If a user is reading an article about cats, and retailer PetSmart Inc. wants to reach that person, GumGum’s vision-based technology can identify the story and place an appropriate ad in the web image.

“If an ad pops up in the middle of that image, it’s much more viewable than the ads which are typically around the content itself,” Kim explained. “We want to provide a premium offering that’s high impact but not intrusive to the end customer.”

GumGum decided to branch out into the sports advertising arena 18 months ago because it saw an opportunity to use AI and computer vision to replace what had essentially been a time-consuming, manual process. Instead of humans trying to monitor the number of times a logo appeared on a screen, GumGum’s AI-powered vision technology tracks and reports the data.

More significantly, the company has developed an ability to analyze the full social media stream, which can sometimes represent a wider audience than the sports event itself. “The biggest surprise that we found was how big social media has become in the valuation,” Kim said. “The reality is that consumers have just changed their habits of where they are consuming content.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s special “Data Makes Possible” CUBE Conversation series. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Western Digital Corp. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE