The web was built around text. Everything from the way in which sites are built to the way that consumers search is built upon a foundation of letters, numbers and symbols. Google’s ability to quickly parse and rank through text-based content on the web and deliver relevant results has made it one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, and Google’s search results have become our de facto starting place for managing and understanding content on the web.

But a major shift has happened in the past five years: Our insatiable hunger for visual information now dominates our collective internet experience. Sure, text is still a part of it, but with a camera in everyone’s pocket and the rise of Instagram, Pinterest and others, more and more data on the web has become nearly invisible in the world of traditional search. Until now.

For brands, the fact that only 20% of the images that feature their products or logos were tagged or captioned, meant that they were blind to 80% of their brand presence on the visual web. That’s an opportunity that was too good for serial entrepreneur and MIT Media Lab professor David Rose to pass up – so he founded Ditto Labs and he and his team created the new standard for searching the visual web using proprietary computer vision and machine learning.

This new way to search necessitates a new experience to help users (primarily marketers) see what was once hidden and discover meaningful insights –  this is where altr came in. Working with the team at Ditto, as well as users who included everyone from brand community managers to CMOs, we designed the future vision for Ditto’s Brand Manager platform. The new system enables users to uncover and make sense of the results of their searches of the visual web.

We’ve gone way beyond tracking simple instances of a brand and focused more on helping users understand the context of that presence – Does the brand appear often with other brands? Which ones? Are people happy around your brand? Does your brand tend to appear alongside other things – Dogs? Skiers? In bookstores? On a beach? Who are the people posting pictures of your brand? Who are they? How influential are they? What else do they like? How have all of these things changed over time?

It’s new, visual world. Ditto Labs has built the system to map it, and we’re working with them to help people understand it and get true value from it