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Shazam Launches Image Search, But Will Anyone Care Except Brands?

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I'm exploring the world of 'Tomorrowland' on my phone, rotating it to look around the virtual city and see tidbits of information here, play a mini-game there. It's a fun distraction until, after a couple minutes, I hit "back" one too many times and I'm thrown back to Shazam, the app that was my key to Disney's concocted sci-fi world. The screen goes black, idling for me to scan another image for another immersion, just like it waits for a user's tap to analyze and identify a song.

F0r Shazam, the startup with a $1 billion valuation thanks to its popular song discovery app, my quick tour off a Disney movie poster is a big deal. After years of rumors and the rise of several upstarts looking to beat it to the punch, Shazam has tapped a phone's camera and added image scanning to its product features, the next step in what CEO Rich Riley says is the vision to "magically connect people to the world around them."

A magical world decided by brand partners like Disney.

What visual Shazam now offers is the ability to scan specially tagged images like posters that have been watermarked to take viewers to a specific mini-site or content experience, or to scan a product QR code and follow it to a similar destination. Tap the little camera icon in the top-left corner of your screen, agree to give the app camera access, and special content will load in less than a second.

For a partner like Disney, that means the promotional mobile site to promote 'Tomorrowland;' for a brand like Levi's a pair of jeans, which can take the potential shopper to a page with promotional videos and Instagram photos of Levi's tagged by their fashion blogger authors as part of a campaign. A scan of Esquire's upcoming June/July issue loads a 17-second video of cover boy Jason Statham welcoming the reader.

They're also all ads. The 'Tomorrowland' dream visual Shazam would do what the app does so well for music--augment reality by identifying and labeling the unknown in what we see, from historic churches to mysterious berries on a hiking trail. The real-life Shazam will charge brands to augment images they want you to see, to sell more stuff. "The use case isn't as much of, 'what is that,' it's about, 'I want to do something additional with that,'" Riley says. With more than 100 million monthly users, Shazam has a large install base for the brands to target, much larger than proprietary promotional apps they might make themselves. "The primary benefit here is to attach our scale with our partners' content," Riley explains.

There's plenty for the brands to like. Shazam offers more than 100 million monthly users globally, with broad demographics Riley says mirror iPhone ownership. Shazam can work closely with each partner to help them watermark an image to prime it for recognition. Many already do that with Shazam to tag television ads. And for Shazam, it's another form of media to tap for potential partners, and ultimately, revenue. At more than ten years old, Shazam can't play the young card. Recent coverage of its January funding round alluded to rumors of a looming IPO. Riley says the company's testing multiple ways to charge brands for the new source of business.

At launch, however, visual Shazam feels shallow, a gimmicky perk for die-hard fans, not the must-have discovery tool it might've been. Riley says the company's working closely with its partners to ensure that viewers find enough reasons to keep coming back. "We care a lot about that consumer experience and the value proposition," he says.

The first-ever printed ad enabled for visual Shazam was for 'Tomorrowland' in the New York Times, running on Friday before its opening weekend. Disney's call to innovation and nostalgia has been met, at least so far, by viewers and critics with a tepid response. Ironically, Shazam's new service gives the impression it didn't buy into that same message it's now helping to sell.

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