Visu­al Mar­ket­ing is the future. So how did Chute get so darn pop­u­lar and where did it come from? If you don’t know Gre­gar­i­ous Narain he is one of the co-founders and CTO of Chute, a com­pa­ny found­ed in 2011. Before that he was the vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct at Klout, there he helped estab­lish the Klout Score as the stan­dard for online influ­ence. Then you have Co-founder Ran­vir Gujral, who explains, “The best brands and pub­lish­ers in the indus­try are bring­ing user-gen­er­at­ed media alive and dis­play­ing it on their site, on their Face­book pages, in their mobile apps, or any­where their con­tent lives. With Chute, pub­lish­ers, brands, and appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to build func­tion­al­i­ty to cap­ture user-gen­er­at­ed media like photos.”

Back in its ear­ly start­up phase at Y Com­bi­na­tor, Chute made it easy for devel­op­ers to get pic­tures in their appli­ca­tions with a cloud-based back­end for image upload­ing, pro­cess­ing, mod­er­a­tion, third-par­ty API inte­gra­tions, and user authen­ti­ca­tion. It also allows you to fil­ter con­tent by sen­ti­ment, pur­chase intent, geog­ra­phy, the most influ­en­tial con­tent cre­ators, and emerg­ing trends. Then you can upload the select­ed con­tent, with rights cleared if the brand requires it, to mar­ket­ing chan­nels using Work­space or oth­er platforms.

Work­space being the company’s main prod­uct, it has the pow­er to clear rights for visu­al con­tent with con­sumer cre­ators, han­dling the work­flow, or engag­ing with fans at scale through auto­mat­ed posts. Mar­keters can use it to track images relat­ed to a giv­en hash­tag, or fol­low con­tent uploaded to a brand’s web­site. Chute claims no one else has their lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion when it comes to ana­lyz­ing the visu­al universe.

As a visu­al mar­keter, every orga­ni­za­tion has to learn how to think visu­al­ly, learn from their cus­tomers, and move at a high speed through an evolv­ing land­scape. Chute looks at the mar­ket and real­ized cus­tomers want to live in an image rich world. So they devel­oped the tools to thrive in the visu­al rev­o­lu­tion. They say “social media man­agers can use us for the brand lift, [mon­i­tor­ing] how competitor’s cam­paigns are per­form­ing” in com­par­i­son, he said, or Insights can be employed to find the most valu­able shar­ers, the influ­encers.  Also if a mar­keter is tru­ly inno­v­a­tive the soft­ware can gen­er­ate all sort of unique visu­al ideas.

Chute has the abil­i­ty to com­pare images to an online stor­age ser­vice after they are tak­en. So once you install the app every new pho­to appears in the appli­ca­tion. Then you just decide whether to share it, or save it on a remote serv­er as they see fit. Good thing for when you break or lose your phone. The whole point is so the images nev­er go to waste, since most just end up sit­ting on the phone going nowhere. You can also set it to imme­di­ate­ly send to Flickr, Twit­ter, Face­book or any oth­er online ser­vice. It also noti­fies oth­er Chute users than you have new images, which can be rat­ed and shared.

Things you should know, Chute is releas­ing an API, and Chute Ads can run as dis­play ad units on any part­ner site. Chute Insights, cou­pled with Chute Work­space, enables mar­keters to quick­ly clear rights, ampli­fy on social, or even put to work imme­di­ate­ly on owned and paid chan­nels. If you have any desire to make your­self a name in the dig­i­tal media indus­try, get­ting your­self into a com­pa­ny like Chute is more than just wise. Let alone that you would be get­ting into the cut­ting edge of visu­al con­tent pro­mo­tion and aggregation.