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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMMA (Enriching Market solutions for content Management and publishing with state of the art multimedia Analysis techniques)

Teaser

Summary

Social Media is nowadays the number one tool used by creative industry companies either for the communication, public relations and marketing, but also as an integrated part of their products and services. Events and destinations are prime example of this, with a lot of stories and social media conversations to be steered, told and consumed.

This social media conversation requires managing and processing information from a very diverse set of sources and thus participants often get overwhelmed. This poses a challenge for companies and brands as they need to find ways to engage their clients in a conversation through a procedure that is not disruptive to the consumer\'s experience while at the same time being highly relevant to it.

To create engaging, up-to-date content experiences that can establish meaningful connections to customers and key stakeholders marketing, PR and communication departments also need to optimally leverage the visual content that they have available. This is often inconsistently tagged and spread across different systems, which makes these key contents very difficult to access when needed.

The EMMA project addressed these challenges. It transferred to creative industry SMEs (more specifically solution providers and professionals for media management, branding, marketing and communication) the most promising state-of-the-art technologies in multimedia analysis coming from the research world. This new technology enhanced existing commercial services, helping SMEs solve both current needs of their customers and anticipate future market requirements and thus becoming more competitive. EMMA thus enables new opportunities to redefine interactive storytelling and content marketing to better connect and engage with audiences through more compelling content and experiences. It does this by:

* Extending existing content to create cross-platform stories and multimedia narratives
* Gaining insights into how their destination or event(s) are perceived in social media
* Running social media campaigns and monitoring engagement with travellers or visitors, steering user-generated content creation, collection and publishing of content
* Turning web and mobile presences into more informative, media-rich and interactive channels suitable for all stakeholders.

Work performed

The first activities or the project were devised around engaging with the projectâ€™s potential target groups and identify early adopters who will provide requirements and test the EMMA tool on a later stage. Based on interviews with the stakeholders identified we derived user requirements alongside use cases and extracted the specific functional system requirements.

Based on the previous work we have implement the EMMA Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and started iterative testing and validation sessions to get feedback, features and improve the EMMA platform. In this iterative process we have tested, refined and updated all technical components of the platform and added also new ones to cover specific user and functional needs. In total we released iteratively 5 versions of the EMMA platform.

The EMMA project carried out numerous validations for each of the releases available from internal testing sessions to workshops to validations in operational conditions to validations with early adopters and with the project\'s Industry Advisory Board. In total 33 test and validation sessions were conducted involving more than 110 people. As a result of this work, we not only have been able to get feedback on the actual developments, but also were able to deploy the EMMA platform for many stakeholders and get also insights for the exploitation of the project.

The last area of the work dealt with communication, dissemination and exploitation activities. The project carried numerous activities from creating the EMMA brand and visual identity and materials to keeping the project website up-to-date, drafting and sending press releases, newsletter. In total we have reached more than 300,000 stakeholders via social media communication channels, submitted 6 scientific publications which were accepted, presented EMMA at 7 academic conferences enlarged the Early Adopter Interest Group to over 280 members, reached more than 72,000 stakeholders through the newsletters and participated at 27 events reaching overall more than 4,000 stakeholders via presentations, networking events and face-to-face meetings.

With regards the exploitation, we have developed a realistic and achievable plan to bring the EMMA results into the market. This will be achieved through the introduction of a new product and brand to the market: Tellit, the must-have tool for communication managers. Tellit enables you to take the initiative in a busy and hectic media environment. With an easy to use interface and a simple design it allows you to find the right content to tell better stories in a more efficient way. A landing page is available at http://tellitapp.com/ and the official market launch is planned for Autumn 2018.

Final results

The EMMA project has developed a number of technologies for the processing, analysis and organisation of multimedia content (especially image and video), which can support innovative creative applications such as interactive media-based storytelling in different thematic domains (e.g. for business events, travel experiences). These include technologies for the tasks of:

* temporal fragmentation of video to shots and scenes;
* concept-based annotation of images and video fragments, with up to several thousand concepts, so that the content becomes searchable by concept;
* automatic assessment of the quality and the aesthetics of images and videos, supporting e.g. the automatic selection of the most visually-pleasing media items;
* clustering or media items, so that summaries of image/video collections are generated;
* detection of near-duplicate images/videos;
* and text categorisation.

These technologies realise a set of functionalities that are interwoven and further combined in order to support more elaborate tasks, allowing for instance to automatically generate summaries of image and video collections that take the aesthetics and the coverage of each media item into account, so as to automatically create and post online attractive promotional content for events or destinations. More technical details about these state of the art technologies can be found in several scientific publications which can be accessed at: https://zenodo.org/communities/emma-h2020/.

The innovation developed by EMMA is timely and relevant for a broad range of organisations that have a strong focus on marketing and content, in particular destination marketing organisations and event organisers. Both of these sectors have a huge market potential, but still too few European ICT actors are taking advantage of it. With EMMA we improve this situation, paving the way to viable commercial products that can take advantage of this market opportunity and ultimately lead to job creation and growth in Europe.

Moreover, apart from the obvious point of saving time and money, and boosting sales efficiencies for its users, EMMA is also a huge step in the direction of fostering healthier consumer relationships. While the benefits of this are not necessarily directly affecting the bottom line of the professionals in tourism and events sectors, it can pay big dividends for them in the long run.