• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 21, 2017

A new entry into the increasingly crowded field of influencer marketing hopes to differentiate itself with a platform enabling brands to match prospective influencers based on how well they dovetail with the look and feel of the brand. The platform, aptly named Dovetale, claims to be the first of its kind to utilize AI-enabled image recognition to seamlessly match influencers to brands.

Simply drag and drop images of the brand and Dovetale’s engine scours YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter and returns results showing the influencers that are most closely aligned.

The approach is a more logical way to match a brand’s affinity to a potential influencer than other platforms in the marketplace that rely strictly on keywords, hashtags or other generic meta data, says Founder Mike Schmidt.

Schmidt says Dovetale is focused on developing agencies and brand direct customers, but it has “baseline” packages designed to entice trial among even relatively small mom-and-pop operations.

The entry-level package costs just $199 and then charges a 2.5% “processing fee” for handling actual transactions between brands and influencers. Dovetale doess not mediate the negotiation between brands and influencers, which are generally handled through email.

On the back-end, Dovetale provides reports measuring the performance of influencer campaigns in real-time, including audience composition and location.

As a bonus incentive, Dovetale is offering a free 30-day trial for its web-based dashboard for qualified brands and agencies at www.dovetale.com.