Cision announced on Monday the acquisition of Berlin-based ShareIQ, which finds, analyzes and indexes original pieces of visual content. The company’s patent-pending technology searches for images and earned media independent of text-based content.

Searching for visual content that may or may not appear alongside text is a primary focus for Cision. “The world is going image-based,” said Kevin Akeroyd, Cision CEO. “The whole earned media and marketing communications industry really enables marketers to capture data for visual content not tied to text.”

ShareIQ’s technology recognizes and monitors any type of earned media from images to logos, and enables marketers to monitor where products appear in pictures or where logos were placed next to tweets or in blog posts and written articles.

Marketers can track patterns and create reports on the business impact through analytics. They can tell when an image gets picked up by influencers and how many times. The data is transcribed into reports or extracted into files that marketers can upload into other platforms.

For example, an unnamed company, which displays and sells women’s lingerie, tracks the types of images displayed and where. They focus on how the images are performing, rather than written articles filled with text, Twitter tweets or blogger’s opinions.  

In another example, if a consumer searches on a brand such as Tommy Hilfiger, it will give marketers a 40-times higher return on search, compared with Google search engine, because it finds and analyzes the content that brands do not associate with text. [

Akeroyd said Cision has acquired about 11 companies to build what he calls a “communications cloud.”

ShareIQ employees, less than 50, will join Cision’s team of more than 4,000 employees located in offices across 15 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Brian Killen, ShareIQ founder, and the team will become part of an Innovation Solutions group within Cision.

Killen will oversee the new business and integration into the Cision Communications Cloud, which will remain in Berlin, a location that Akeroyd plans to build out.