FLOWSAM^® FAQ

Flowsam.ai is an artificial intelligence and computer vision platform designed to predict visual attention.

It analyzes your creative assets (like videos and images) and generates a heat map showing where a person is most likely to look in the first few seconds and combines this with detection and tracking of objects in the video or image.

It helps brands ensure their key messages and branding are actually being seen by their audience.

The platform is built on the concept of “biological saliency.” The AI was trained on massive datasets of real human eye-tracking studies, where thousands of people’s pupil movements were recorded as they watched content.

By analyzing this data, the AI learned the universal, involuntary patterns of human attention. It’s not guessing; it’s running a simulation based on how our brains are hardwired to notice things like contrast, motion, and faces.

For the specific, crucial question of what a person sees, yes.

Traditional focus groups are slow, expensive, and subject to human bias (people saying what they think you want to hear). The human eye, however, doesn’t lie. Flowsam strips away that bias by focusing on the raw, physiological data of where attention goes, providing a consistent and objective measure.

For deeper emotional feedback, human testing is still relevant, but for verifying visual attention, the AI is faster, more affordable, and more objective.

The vampire effect is a common marketing pitfall where a highly distracting element in an ad, such as a famous celebrity, ”vampires” all the visual attention away from the actual product or brand being advertised.

Viewers look at the famous face, but they don’t see the can of soda in their hand. Flowsam can help you identify this issue before you spend your media budget.

You can upload a video or an image and receive a predictive heat map within minutes, allowing for rapid testing and iteration of your creative assets.

In addition to the attention prediction and object detection that Flowsam performs, we recommend you spend a few minutes tagging which of the detected objects are relevant to the branding and messaging in the ad.

Still, this speed is a stark contrast to traditional research methods that can take weeks or even months.

Flowsam is for brands of all sizes. A core part of its mission is to democratize the kind of high-end, data-driven research that was once only accessible to giant corporations with six-figure research budgets.

Startups and mid-sized companies can now access the same level of visual attention insights as the world’s biggest brands.

Not at all. The goal is to support and empower creativity. Think of Flowsam as a “structural engineer” for your creative work. An architect still designs a beautiful building, but an engineer ensures it won’t collapse.

Similarly, Flowsam provides the data to ensure a beautiful ad is also effective, helping creatives prove to clients that their work will capture attention where it matters most.

Distinctive assets are the visual shortcuts that instantly signal your brand to a consumer. This includes your logo, brand colors, packaging shape, or even a specific font.

For a brand to become memorable (”mentally available”), consumers need to see these assets. Flowsam verifies that this crucial step is actually happening.

Flowsam was born out of frustration. One of the founders, a global marketer, was tired of the slow, expensive, and inefficient process of traditional creative testing.

She and her three co-founders began building the platform in 2018, giving them a significant head start in the AI space, to solve the problem they were facing every day.