Face.com was the largest face recognition platform on the cloud.
Company Goal:
Bring Face Recognition to the masses
Clarity's Challenge:
Put the “Face” in Facebook
About
hese days, we take face recognition for granted, as it does everything from unlocking your phone to helping police find missing persons. Not that long ago, however, mass adoption of face recognition was still locked in the realm of science fiction. Unlocking the potential of this nascent technology was the challenge faced (ahem) by Face.com when they launched back in 2008 with a small team based in Tel Aviv. Another challenge, this time for Clarity: like most great sci-fi technologies, teaching computers how to identify any human, anywhere seemed just as likely to spawn Skynet as the iPhone X.
The team needed a strategy that put a friendly face (ahem again) on a deeply technical product that had just as many potential pitfalls as benefits. Working with Face from the moment they launched to their acquisition by Facebook in 2012, the Bay Area Clarity team developed a strategy that highlighted both the consumer and developer-friendly sides of the company. Primarily, they provided API resources to software developers, large and small, including a variety of programming tools centered on face recognition and face detection. A significant part of our role with Face.com was building out their developer network, from small independent app developers to large multi-national partners such as Intel.
We helped Face.com grow their developer community from an initial node of several hundred people to a community of more than 45,000 active members, through a combination of media outreach, direct messaging, newsletters, events, Hackathons and speaking opportunities. Face.com grew to be the premier provider of consumer face recognition and detection on the Web.
Whether it was launching direct to consumer products like Photo Finder (to find photos of yourself on Facebook), highlighting odd and attention-grabbing consumer applications from Face users, or putting on amazing parties featuring the vocal stylings of Randi Zuckerberg – Clarity also developed strategies designed to demystify this extremely mysterious tech.
The Results
- Worked with the company from launch through eventual acquisition by Facebook in 2012
- Grew Face.com’s developer network from a few hundred to over 45,000
- Secured appearances by the CEO on Good Morning America and ABC Nightline
- Hundreds of original articles in every major outlet from Reuters, the New York Times, and CNN to Wired, MIT Tech Review, and TechCrunch
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