Allison Shragal, 28, of Chicago, isn’t a model, or
Internet famous — she’s an administrative assistant for a general contracting
company. But almost every day companies pay her to snap photos of herself
engaging in routine activities — brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, cleaning
the bathroom.
If Ms. Shragal takes enough selfies with her smartphone
and uploads them to a special app, she has “an extra $20 to go get my nails
done,” she said.
Her seemingly mundane images, when combined with
thousands of others, contain insights that companies like Crest are eager to
mine. They are using a Chicago-based company called Pay Your Selfie to gather
those insights and present them in reports on consumer behavior that are meant
to go where focus groups and surveys cannot.
Among the tidbits that Crest, owned by Procter &
Gamble, learned from its recent month long quest for selfies: There’s a huge
spike in brushing from 4 to 6 p.m., probably tied to a desire for happy-hour
fresh breath. That knowledge could be useful when Crest decides which times of
the day to start future social media campaigns.
Users of the app receive anywhere from 20 cents to $1 for
each “task” completed — in Crest’s case, a snapshot taken “while brushing your
teeth with your favorite Crest product.” Users can’t double-dip; the app allows
only one selfie per task.
The selfies are a good way for companies to obtain
information that people can’t or don’t articulate in focus groups or other
traditional research methods, said Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for
Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. For example, they could
lead to an understanding of which rituals go along with certain types of
consumption, he said.
Pay Your Selfie, which has been in business since last
September, doesn’t require participants to have followers on a site like
Instagram. In fact, users don’t have to share their images publicly at all
(although they can). That makes it different from a company like Popular Pays,
which offers Instagrammers the chance to post about brands like Nike in
exchange for giveaways or cash.
The option of privacy suggests a greater possibility for
authenticity, said Aparna Labroo, a professor of marketing at the Northwestern
University Kellogg School of Management. “If the task comes up when a person is
naturally engaging in a relevant activity and it’s minimally intrusive to take
a selfie, they might actually capture some authentic moments.”
About 11 percent of the men in the Crest photos were
shirtless, a level of comfort the brand rarely sees when it uses other tools in
its research arsenal, said Kris Parlett, a senior communications manager for
P.&G. Oral Care. Other research methods include recruiting volunteers to
record videos of their oral care routine in their bathrooms or to brush their
teeth in “insight suites,” mocked-up home bathrooms with mirrors that allow
analysts to observe them.
“It’s not data you could get through Nielsen,” said
Michelle Smyth, a founder of Pay Your Selfie, referring to the bare-chested
photos. “It’s one-of-a-kind research.”
Companies set a target number of selfies to be collected,
in the thousands or tens of thousands, and give Pay Your Selfie at least $2 per
usable image, a portion of which goes to the selfie taker. A computer scans the
photos to make sure that there’s a face and that the shot isn’t too dark.
App users, who must provide some basic biographical data
like age and city, receive payment only for “validated” photos, and can cash
out at $20. Eight Pay Your Selfie employees pore over the photos to produce
reports on their findings.
The results are eye-opening, said Alex Blair, who owns
four franchises of Freshii, a Toronto-based chain of healthy fast-food outlets.
It has sponsored two tasks on Pay Your Selfie.
In one, the company asked participants to provide selfies
with “healthy on-the-go” snacks. For some people that meant Snickers candy
bars.
“We focus on organics and cool new macronutrients, and
our consumers are into quinoa and kale and bean sprouts,” Mr. Blair said. “But
some of these photos were so far from that wavelength, it’s really helping us
kind of realign with the mass market.”
Mr. Blair said the selfies could be used to help
determine whether stores should focus more on smoothies or prepackaged snacks.
(The selfies leaned toward the latter.) The images also might identify
neighborhoods to place new stores in, based on whether people are in their
offices (suggesting a financial district opening might be a good bet) or on the
couch at home in their exercise clothes.
One problem with traditional consumer research is the gap
between what people say they do (or would like to think they do) and what they
actually do. Selfies would seem to have the same problem, as anyone who’s ever
posed for one and decided it was too embarrassing or revealing to share knows.
But Ms. Shragal, for one, says she’s become so accustomed to the app that she
doesn’t scrutinize the photos.
“In the beginning I focused on trying to do a cool
picture,” said Ms. Shragal, who used to make aesthetic adjustments like wiping the
toothpaste off her mouth before taking the Crest image. “But after doing it for
so many months, I kind of just focus on doing the task correctly and getting it
done.”
Often tasks don’t require owning or buying a company’s
product. But Lakeshore Beverage, a Chicago distributor, asked users to snap a
selfie with a Goose Island 312 ale, and learned which stores people visited to
buy the beer.
“It was interesting to us because the user base on the
app is a little more general than the beer-specific buyer that we target
through our marketing,” said Matt Tanaka, who was until recently Lakeshore’s
head of digital marketing. “It helps us when we’re talking to retailers where
people took a lot of selfies to say these places are top of mind.” (In the case
of 312, the places were Target and Walgreens.) Pay Your Selfie would not reveal
how many clients it has worked with.
The company also conducts its own research
— partly as a way to attract new business. “What are you eating for breakfast?”
was a recent task it asked its users to complete. For millennials, top choices
were Pop-Tarts and Froot Loops, the photos showed. (Pay Your Selfie’s founders
said they later had a meeting with a “major cereal brand.”)
Even tasks not
sponsored by individual companies “are a fast and powerful way to share what
seems uninteresting information to consumers but critical information to
marketers,” said Jean McLaren, president of Marc USA, an advertising agency
whose clients include Rite Aid. She said she was considering working with Pay
Your Selfie.
Ms. McLaren said she liked the idea of recreating a
person’s pantry by stringing together multiple seemingly random selfies from
the same users — a cheaper, faster way to get information that once could be
obtained only through lengthy in-home interviews.
“It’s like automated voyeurism,” she said.
