New Paper: "Language of images: Classifying marketing images with transformers and vision language models"

15 February 2026, by customer insight

Photo: ci

Seeing is easy. Understanding is not.
If images tell stories, which AI models are actually listening? Images are central to modern marketing, shaping advertising and driving engagement across social media. Yet most AI systems still focus on detecting what is visible, rather than interpreting what it means. New generations of AI promise more: models that move beyond pixels to capture relationships, context, and even narrative. But greater sophistication does not automatically mean greater reliability.
Some models excel at reading scenes holistically, others stumble in surprisingly basic situations. Our analysis shows that no single approach dominates across all marketing tasks. Instead, the real opportunity lies in knowing which models to use for which questions - and when combining them leads to better, more trustworthy insights.

Read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811626000017