Styria Media’s AI-driven classifieds marketplace product

By Joanne Kuai

Initiatives are crucial and getting ahead of the customers gives you the edge in a competitive market but it’s also important to bear in mind customers’ adaption to new things and convey the messages to them in a language they would understand, said Marko Velic, Head of Data Science at Styria Media, when sharing insights on practical and strategic perspectives on data in media companies.

“We can’t just expect from what the customers want, because they don’t even know the possibilities. But if you have the idea, technology, and come up with the prototypes and show to them, they may welcome it,” said Velic. on November 2 in London at the 8^th Data & AI for Media Conference.

“As scientists and engineers, it’s hard to communicate ‘accuracy number’ to the customers. Then we come up with a way to describe it as the clicks and time you would save in ad placement. It’s a concept they would better understand.”

The largest media company in the Southeast Europe region, Styria Media’s award-winning data department has produced a variety of AI-driven, revenue-making products, including their classified marketplace. The operation includes AI features such as the seller’s side object recognition for ad placement, and visual search for buyers, as well as a recommendation engine and personalisation based on NLP for news portals.

AI-driven marketplace

Founded in 2015, Styria Media has grown into a company of 14 people. Velic introduced their experience on AI-driven marketplace. With visual search, the goal from a seller’s perspective would be easy and fast ways for ad placements, while the goal from the buyer’s side would be finding visually similar ads.

“You have to target the same time at the sellers’ and the buyers’ goals. How we do it is that the seller can take a picture and the user’s ad would be identified and categorised automatically. Then for buyers, it would do the visual search for the similar contents,” said Velic. He added, launched in August 2016, their visual search product is the first in the world, a year ahead of eBay and two years ahead of Facebook.

Styria Media is also working on object detection based on classification and localization which, in Velic’s opinion, has great potential of application in marketplaces as well.

Velic is one of the speakers at the 8^th Data & AI for Media Conference. The conference is for media and data practitioners who are seeking to earn revenue and expand audiences by leveraging data and artificial intelligence. The 2-day event features a powerful format of general sessions with top-notch speakers, plus interactive, small-group breakout sessions called “huddles.”