Bluefin Labs

Bluefin Labs uses proprietary algorithms to match social media comments to televised content. The methodology of associating comments to TV is composed of three parts: temporal analysis (looking at when a comment is posted), semantic analysis (matching written comments to what’s on TV), and machine learning (the ongoing process of training and re-training the matching algorithm). Bluefin also employs a proprietary algorithm for sentiment and gender analysis of the social media comments. The resulting data set is a large network of cause-effect links that measures people's engagement with TV, effectively creating a viewer/programmer feedback loop. This network is designed to provide marketers and media companies with insights that could be used for more efficient ad targeting and more informed content and creative development. Bluefin calls this mapping of social media commentary back to its televised stimulus the "TV Genome" – a highly complex endeavor that, like the Human Genome Project, requires immense computational resources along with deep-rooted techniques in cognitive science and machine learning. Bluefin has a view into more than 5 billion public-facing social media comments each month, tied to a continuously growing video fingerprint archive of more than one million distinct airings of TV shows and commercials. Bluefin currently ingests and performs video fingerprinting of 115 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks.