How Ogilvy UK Used YouScan’s Visual Listening to Track Cultural Resonance
Tracking brand mentions on social media is a surefire way to understand audience perception. Yet, what often defines a brand isn’t text- but visually based. That’s where AI-powered visual listening enters the play.
This was the case for Ogilvy UK – ads, marketing, and PR agency from London. The team leveraged YouScan’s Visual Insights to identify how Aperol – a competitor brand – had become visually embedded in culture. 🍊
🎥 The use case was presented during the video session hosted by The Social Intelligence Lab. Watch Celia Dearden-Briggs, Head of Social & Contextual Intelligence at Ogilvy UK. Watch the full session:
The Challenge
Ogilvy UK was participating in a pitch where they needed to analyse and demonstrate how Aperol resonated culturally.
Instead of relying on text mentions only, the Social and Contextual Intelligence Team of Ogilvy UK decided to use YouScan visual analysis to see how brand associations were represented visually across social media, blogs, and forums in the UK.
The YouScan platform was able to help them:
Identify where the distinctive Aperol’s orange colour appeared on social media
Find visual mentions and branded elements
Measure and benchmark Aperol against other brands with a similar colour scheme
The analysis covered a range from October 21st 2024 to May 4th 2025, giving a broader picture of Aperol's presence in online conversations in the UK.
The Solution
Ogilvy UK, through listening with YouScan, could clearly see qualitatively that the mentions were present in culture. The main idea was to back it up with quantitative data. Thanks to YouScan’s AI-based visual analysis, the Ogilvy UK team reviewed over 1.3 million visual mentions containing numerous shades of orange in blogs, forums, and social media. The visuals appeared in:
🖼 Artwork
🍑 Food
🌅 Golden hour images
🤳 Selfies with filters
Within this dataset, the team behind Ogilvy UK was able to collect Aperol references in texts, visuals & logos. But that’s not the tip of it. YouScan’s tools also let the team detect mentions of Aperol in spoken word, not relying on text-only social media listening.
Key Results
At first glance, only 0,01% of this conversation corresponded to Aperol, which seemed a low number to confirm the brand’s presence and popularity.
However, the team decided to take for reference other positioned brands associated with this colour using Visual Insights, and it resulted in quantitative data:
🟠 Nickelodeon’s presence was at 0,01% as well
🍊 Fanta’s presence was measured with 0,03%
Ultimate Insights
Ogilvy UK has come to a conclusion that Aperol's 0,01% penetration was, in fact, a strong indicator of presence and well-positioned cultural embedment.
The visual analysis powered by YouScan and thinking outside-of-the-box allowed Ogilvy UK to quantify cultural resonance where direct mentions seemed to be low and to realize that a colour may be an insight-driven differentiator. It’s yet another proof that advanced visual listening can reveal multi-layered dimensions of brand identity that traditional social listening might often miss.
