Why do sports images grab our attention?
This week 120.8 million people tuned in for the Super Bowl making it the most watched show in US TV history. With roughly 40 NBC video cameras, some shooting in 4K at 120 frames a second, the game churned out a mind-blowing number of images. Not to mention the hundreds of photographers that were there shooting, on average, 2000 photos each during the game.
It’s not just the volume of images produced that’s extraordinary. A staggering number of these images are also consumed—purchased, clicked, tweeted, and shared. Super Bowl related hashtags were tweeted over 5 million times already this month, a significant portion of the tweets containing images. This level of engagement proves what we all know, that sport is special.
But what is it about sports images that grabs our attention?
Watching Neon select images for a variety of content, I see particular cognitive and perceptual principles driving image engagement time and time again. But sports images make me stop. Sports imagery is always exciting. And I think it’s because sport so perfectly captures the principles that we have modeled from the human brain, principles that we know will reliably grab viewers’ attention.
The fact that the football game is aired live, combined with the uncertainty of how it will unfold, means that these trillions of images need to be organized and distributed in almost real-time. It’s why at Neon, we decided to process all of the images from Twitter with the hashtags #Superbowl2015 and #SB49 with our automated, real-time image selection software, so we could instantly surface the most engaging images of Super Bowl 2015. Here’s what we found.
Emotional Intensity
Instability
Faces
Brightness
How did we do it?
We used Twitter’s API to collect images tweeted with the hashtag #Superbowl2015 and #SB49. Neon’s image software then automatically ranked and scored the images. The Neon score predicts emotional engagement and the likelihood that an image will be clicked.
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Neon is the fully automated image selection platform for monetizing digital content. Neon’s proprietary scientific solution increases revenue for leading online news, sports, entertainment media publishers, advertisers and marketers.
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