Picturing Web Shoppers
U.K. Start-Up Draws 'Visual DNA' to Use
For Market Research
By LEILA ABBOUD

January 19, 2007

In the rush to tap Internet surfers' tastes and help online advertisers target more specific audiences, one British software start-up is pushing a different vision.

Instead of standard questionnaires about income levels and family size, Imagini has developed a sort of electronic Rorschach test. It presents an array of photographs, and asks people which one best describes phrases such as "My idea of a good time..." or "Happiness to me is..." The software then analyzes the photo choices and come up with what Imagini calls "visual DNA": a profile of a person's tastes, attitudes toward work and family and other characteristics.
TAKE IMAGINI'S QUIZ

[imagini ]
Click here or on the above image to visit Imagini's site and try out the quiz.

Imagini, launched 18 months ago by Alex Willcock, a former Conran Group marketing executive, is one of an increasing number of firms seeking to push market research to the next level. The London start-up uses pictures instead of words to gather data. Clients say Imagini can pick up on subtleties that other consumer tracking misses, such as people's motivations or aspirations. Because its tests, which appear on sites such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, give users instant feedback on their personalities and tastes, it has attracted attention from Web surfers and bloggers who might turn their noses up at a typical market research quiz.

In December Imagini posted a gift finder on its site, imagini.net. To come up with gift ideas for a friend, the user chooses from sets of photos to answer questions about the person such as "Their favorite color is..." or "Their house looks like...". The program then matches the answers with everything from gadgets to books. Users can search for gifts for themselves, and email a wish list to friends and families. Some 12,000 people took the test in the first 12 hours it was on the site, Imagini says.

Such ideas have drawn clients such as MSN, mobile-phone provider Vodafone PLC and British shopper-loyalty program Nectar, which have used Imagini's software to gauge reaction to ad campaigns and identify clusters of consumers.

The most common approach to such research, "behavioral targeting," uses software to track the Web sites people visit as well as when and what they buy online. Yahoo! and other such sites use that information to tailor ads for particular groups of customers. Big online advertisers rely on such "clickstream" research because it provides quantifiable data on sites users have already visited. Imagini's visual surveys, on the other hand, allow users to provide their own definition of their likes and dislikes.

Imagini's tack has its skeptics. Bill Gossman, chief executive of New York-based Revenue Science Inc., which uses behavioral targeting to help online publications channel ads to readers, sees Imagini's reliance on people's answers to questions about themselves as potentially flawed. "I'm telling the service about myself instead of the system learning about me," as tracking Web surfing would do, he says.

Imagini's founder Mr. Willcock sees that as the service's chief strength. The use of images, instead of words, he says, "allows you to understand consumers on a deeper and more subtle level" to gain insight into their motivations and what they might do in the future.

Every time a person takes an Imagini test, the information is compiled into a database, which groups people into different clusters. More than 130,000 people have taken the visual quiz so far, matching a picture with statements such as "If an extra hour appeared today, this is how I would spend it." Nearly 10% of respondents to that statement selected images that depicted people reading or lounging around with a book in bed. Such a cluster could be targeted with ads for bookstores or magazines.

While Imagini remains a niche application, it has started to attract more attention. In late October, MSN did a pilot project in which it linked to an Imagini test on its Web site for a week. Some 50,000 people took the quiz. Microsoft plans to mine the data for clusters of people who can then be used to attract online advertisers selling everything from vacations to mortgages.

Nectar, the U.K.'s biggest customer-loyalty program, with 22 million members collecting points on purchases, found it easier to gather customer information using Imagini than through typical online surveys. Nectar, a division of closely held Loyalty Management UK, sent 170,000 members an email questionnaire about their views and tastes. Half got text-based questions via email, and half got the Imagini test. Nectar found people were 3.5 times more likely to complete the Imagini questionnaire.

Write to Leila Abboud at leila.abboud@wsj.com