Q&A with G=mc2

Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award winner G=mc2

Editor’s note: G=mc2 is the winner of the 2022 Best New Product/Service Innovation Award which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. This award is for a product, tool or service that made an impact on the marketing research industry.  To find out more about the awards click here.

G=mc2’s focus is helping brands identify and turn on full potential growth. The key to this is making sure that any insight or strategy it delivers comes with activation guidelines built in. Visible is an image-based insight platform able to gather tens of thousands of visual data points. Visible is built to solve two problems. First, it enables G=mc2 to conduct cultural insight and semiotic analysis in a way that is scaled, robust and human centric. Second, it both informs strategy and guides activation. Visible provides clients with an activation-ready view of the world it gives them.

Can you give a brief overview of what the innovation does and how it works? 

Visual culture is our collective imagination in full color and yet often this rich resource, the tens of millions of images that people spontaneously share to document their own lives, goes ignored. At G=mc2 our focus is helping brands identify and turn on full potential growth and so we make sure that any insight or strategy we deliver comes with activation guidelines built in. That’s why we created ‘Visible.’ 

Visible is an image-based insight platform that brings together the principles of ethnography and semiotics to analyze visual culture at scale. Launched in Beta at the end of 2020 and in its full-service form in February of last year, Visible is able to gather and cluster visual content from Instagram, other social platforms and from across the web more broadly. 

Visible is built to solve two problems. Firstly, in terms of insight, it can conduct cultural insight and semiotic analysis in a way that is scaled, robust and looks at stimulus that has been created by real people about their own lives as well as broader ‘cultural’ content from brands editorial, etc. Secondly, Visible bridges the ‘activation gap’ because visual insight not only informs strategy but guides creativity.

What long-term benefits do you expect your innovation to have?  

Images in market research are often an afterthought, gathered later in the process to bring an idea to life or to bring color to a PowerPoint presentation. For us images can tell us so much more than words. Visible is just the first step on a journey to putting images at the heart of the work we do, understanding people, culture and the future to power full potential growth. We think the possibilities are limitless and we think it is a field that will expand rapidly over the next few years because it delivers rich and easy-to-activate insight at pace and scale. 

Is there anything you would change about your innovation?

We love being able to deliver rich strategic understanding of the world which is easy to turn into activation. For us the journey of development is just that, a journey and so we’ll continue to build in further rigor, depth of analysis, automation and creative possibility to the tool that we have built.