Computer vision is new growth

Computer vision is a reality.

We are already seeing a significant number of mobile applications leveraging computer vision — in a nutshell, the ability to recognize visual patterns in images through digital signal processing — to deliver their “aha moment”.

Computer vision is already a core driver of growth, that is, user acquisition, retention, and advocacy, in such unicorns apps as snapchat or MSQRD, recently purchased by Facebook as I brought it up in another recent post.

What’s the impact of that emerging trend in the future of growth hacking?

Lead Generation with computer vision

Marketers are now commonly using basic forms of computer vision through QR codes or snapcodes to simplify the mobile user onboarding of their core target markets.

But things become much more interesting when there is no more need to create basic visual patterns outside of your growth marketing mix. When you can directly leverage the visuals in your social storytelling, your livestreaming, or any visual marketing asset you are rolling out to capture new leads, or acquire new users.

Yesterday, I was watching Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, livestreaming about their charity work on education among other. With computer vision you can imagine him say “snap a picture of our live stream now to join our program”, same for opting in a commercial marketing offer.

The key from a user flow standpoint is simplicity.

There is no need to clutter the design with another call-to-action button, there is no need to include a visually unsatisfying 2D code. It’s dead simple. It drives action.

e-Commerce with computer vision

Now, it’s easier to understand another impact of computer vision on growth.

Think e-Commerce.

You can buy an object from any picture featured on a website, demoed in a livestream, or even in real life (Fun fact: a few years ago I ventured on creating a working early mobile app to allow women to buy handbags off of each other in real life — it was using computer vision).

In the use case of durable-consumable products in our daily lives, we will simply snap the durable to order the associated consumable before the object be directly connected to the cloud to refill the consumable at the perfect moment, to create these new aha moments of the Internet of things’ experiences.

Visual storytelling with computer vision

A key component to growth marketing, especially in the social realm, is visual storytelling.

Today, 10x visual storytelling is achieved through fast iteration, growth learning. We can think of it as agile learning via known methods such as high-tempo ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) as coined by growth hacking leaders such as Sean Ellis, founder of the GrowthHackers.com community, and inspiring growth marketer.

In the future, in the same way companies like Persado or their competitors will totally remove the guesswork out of copywriting for growth marketing, computer vision will remove the guesswork out of growth marketing through visual storytelling.

Based on big data, fueled by the ever expanding oceans of social media digital interaction signals, we will be using apps that will automatically generate the most responsive visuals for any clearly defined target audience.

How exciting is that?

So there’s hope that one day, very soon actually, there will no longer be room for traditional advertising that tend to disrupt the value flow of the digital experiences we encounter online or on mobile.

And computer vision will show us the way to this new north star of growth.

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