If you’ve seen the film “Minority Report”, you might remember the nature of some of the future advertising that was featured – ie specific targeting of the individual characters from the animated billboards by name based on their likes  etc.

Well now it appears as though we are a step closer to that sort of thing, with the news that an American software company, Ditto Labs, has developed image recognition software for social media images.

The software will recognise specific brand’s logos that feature within the images, then scan the rest of the picture to see what other brands are visible.

The idea is that they can then build up a set of data about which brands happily “co-exist” in the minds of consumers – ie if there are lots of people in the social media images wearing a particular brand of clothing, that also tend to wear a certain brand of watch, this information can be useful for advertisers in terms of who they target with their advertising.

Apparently, one of the significant pieces of data they’ve gathered so far is that 13% of the people who feature the Adidas logo in their social media images are also “interested in Justin Bieber”…