Tumblr images will soon be scanned for brand affiliation

Tumblr is an immense sea of valuable, publicly available user data just waiting to be tapped by marketers interested in how the cool internet teens use their products, just search “Starbucks” to see what I mean.Tumblr, it seems, is also ready to help corporations cash in on its users’ impeccably curated tastes. It just inked a deal with Ditto, a company that scans images on the web for branded products and sells the results to multinationals like Coca-Cola and Kraft, and part of the deal involves giving Ditto wholesale access to all of Tumblr’s photos.

Every day, users post about 130 million photos on Tumblr. Starting this week, the Yahoo-owned media brand will start to parse all those images for clues to users’ brand affiliations. Tumblr is inking a deal this week with Ditto Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm that has analyzed photos posted on social media for brand-related data. That doesn’t mean that if you post a selfie with a Coke bottle in the background that you’ll start seeing ads for Coke. “Right now, we’re not planning to do anything ad-related,” says T.R. Newcomb, head of business development at Tumblr. Instead, Ditto’s data will be available to advertisers who want to grok how they are perceived on the platform. “If Coke wants to understand the nature of the conversation [about them on Tumblr] Ditto can sift through and deliver it to Coke,” Newcomb says.