So if you need an extra twenty bucks and take selfies all the time why not download the app Pay Your Selfie™, which is basically the marketing research people cutting out the facebook middlemen and paying you directly for the data you give them.
As a user of the app you get a “task”, such as selfie yourself brushing your teeth, eating ice-cream, having a protein bar, or similar, and each task has a cash value from 20 cents to $1. When you’ve reached the sum $20 bucks you can cash out. What’s in it for the marketers? Where and how you take the selfie reveals more honest information to them than you might have in a focus group. Crest had a “selfie with your favourite crest product “task out for a month, and the selfie results showed a spike in people brushing their teeth between 4-6 pm, just in time for happy hour. This is the type of information not so easily gleaned from focus groups.
The NYT more, they’re interviewed people using the app for research and those who are taking selfies, and shows that this may indeed be a better way to get consumer data. For the users there’s the option of privacy, there’s no need to share the selfie sin public at all. Unless you want to. Which also means that the users of selfie do not have to be on Instagram or Twitter or anything else. This makes the selfie-taker relax and not worry so much about staging the picture, instead simply completing the test so they can cash out their $20 bucks. Many consumers don’t mind telling brands what they really want at all, but on their terms. By cutting out the creepy facebook stalking, and handing a bit of the profit to the consumers themselves Pay Your Selfie has a chance at becoming really big. Teenagers who have emigrated from Instagram to snapchat, and take a thousand selfies a day already, may find the app to be a fun game where you can actually earn cash too.
Jean McLaren, president of Marc USA calls it “automated voyeurism”, a phrase that will stick I’m sure.
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.”
