Advertising over Time: Interactive Machine Learning for Image Data Analysis

广告在世界上所有的社会中无处不在，对人类的行为有很大的影响。如今，像欧莱雅、辉瑞、宝洁和卡夫海因茨这样的公司每年在杂志上的平面广告花费超过20亿美元。过去的研究表明，广告的各种影响（例如，对销售，品牌忠诚度，市场份额稳定性等）。然而，除了广告支出的水平，广告的实际内容和风格也至关重要。这是现有的经济学和管理学文献普遍忽视的东西。随着大数据和当今日益增长的计算能力的到来，我们有一个推动者准备填补这一研究空白。更准确地说，我们拥有一套从1843年至今超过100万的平面广告。我们建议应用机器学习和人工智能技术从广告中提取相关特征，并利用它们来识别广告内容和风格的模式。我们的研究项目包括两个主要支柱：其中一个是从“交互式机器学习系统”的开发中获取设计知识。该系统由两个部分组成：“交互式标签”和“交互式分析”。这种互动旨在创建一个系统，使用户直接参与学习和分析过程，并旨在满足用户的需求。我们提出的研究项目的另一个支柱包括使用开发的系统在广告研究中产生新的见解。我们要回答的问题是：随着时间的推移，印刷广告是如何变化的，特别是在广告文本、广告图像特征和广告复杂性方面？这些变化与提高消费者生活速度的外部事件有多大关系？

Advertising is omnipresent in all societies around the world and has a strong influence on human behavior. Today, companies such as L'Oréal, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble and Kraft Heinz together spend more than $2 billion a year on print ads in magazines. Past research has shown various effects of advertising (e.g. on sales, brand loyalty, market-share stability etc.). However, in addition to the level of advertising spending, the actual content and style of advertising is also crucial. This is something that the existing economics and management literature has widely neglected.With big data and todays increasing computing power at hand we have an enabler ready to fill this research gap. To be more precise, we possess a set of more than 1 Mio print ads from 1843 up to today. We propose to apply Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques to extract relevant features from the ads and use them to identify patterns in the content and style of the advertisements.Our research project consists of two main pillars: One of them is to derive design knowledge from the development of an "Interactive Machine Learning System". This system consists of two components: "Interactive Labeling" and "Interactive Analytics". The interaction is intended to create a system that directly involves the user in the learning and analysis process and is designed to meet the user's needs. The other pillar of our proposed research project consists of using the developed system to generate new insights in advertising research. Questions that we will answer are: How have print advertisements changed over time, especially with regard to ad text, ad image characteristics and ad complexity? How far are these changes related to external events that increase consumers' speed of life?