Ditto Labs

Ditto Labs was a technology company that provided an image recognition and data analytics platform for brands and marketing agencies. Founded in 2012 by David Rose, Joshua Wachman, and Neil Mayle, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup specialized in detecting brands and logos within photos shared on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. The company's deep learning technology was designed to identify brand presence, even when logos were partially obscured, and analyze the context in which products appeared, including the sentiment of people in the photos by detecting smiles.

The platform offered clients insights into how consumers were organically using and sharing their products, providing a rich source of visual data that often went untracked by text-based analytics tools. This allowed marketers to monitor brand visibility, compare performance against competitors, and adjust marketing strategies in near real-time. For example, the system could identify specific patterns like Burberry's plaid or recognize products within various settings, such as indoors, outdoors, or with pets, to understand consumer behavior "in the wild." The business served brands, agencies, and research firms, raising a total of $14.2M in funding from investors including August Capital and Cue Ball. In November 2018, Ditto Labs was acquired by Slyce.

Keywords: image recognition, brand analytics, social media monitoring, computer vision, logo detection, visual listening, consumer insights, marketing technology, deep learning, sentiment analysis, brand intelligence, social analytics, visual data, photo analytics, brand perception, market research, adtech, competitor analysis, customer behavior