October 15,2015ByDAVID VEGA
Picture This: Marketers See The Value Of Visual Media
The art of storytelling is changing in the digital age. The growing use of photos, videos, animations, and infographics has altered the way consumers act—and, as a result, the methods that marketers use to create and maintain customer engagement are undergoing a transformation. ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS: Millennials “want a real and compelling story that avoid marketing jargon and clichés.” Only about one-quarter of respondents had a process to aggregate, organize, and manage visual assets used across teams, according to the CMO Council. The challenge for marketers is to produce content that works across multiple channels and different devices. “We’re in an interesting period in terms of visual assets. The definition of what is visual and what is required to connect to consumers is undergoing a transformation,” said Liz Miller, senior vice president of marketing for the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. To be sure, getting a message across to potential customers is increasingly challenging. Not only is it necessary to develop marketing materials that communicate a concept through pictures and words, it is important to deliver it in the right way for a particular channel and device. “Whereas in the past visuals were more the icing on the cake, they are now the cake,” Miller told CMO.com. “A creative team must focus on capturing a person’s attention and leading them through the process in a way that seems natural and intuitive.” Added Michael Boland, chief analyst and vice president of content at marketing consulting firm BIA/Kelsey: “Rich media is critical to marketing success.” However, the path to progress can prove bumpy. A CMO Council survey in partnership with Libris, “From Content to Creativity: The Role of Visual Media in Impactful Brand Storytelling,” found that while 65% of senior marketing executives said they believe visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated, only 27% have the ability to aggregate, organize, and manage these assets across marketing and nonmarketing teams—including those outside of the organization. Meanwhile, the use of visual assets is continuing to rise. The study found that senior marketing executives expect the use of video to spike by 79%, infographics by 50%, and illustrations by 41% in the near future. Image Is Everything Although images have always played an important role in marketing and advertising—magazine ads, billboards, television commercials, and other media have served as a mainstay for decades—the nature of imagery is changing due to a number of factors, industry observers said. “High-quality optics and cameras on smartphones have changed the way people think about imagery,” Boland told CMO.com. At the same time, social media has exploded, and the way consumers create, exchange and view photos, video, and other imagery on small screens or second screens has changed considerably. “People are increasingly conditioned to use fewer words and more imagery,” he added. Overlaying all of this are Millennials with a strong distaste for messages and images that look artificial, Boland said. Because they are fluent in using image-based technologies they are more adept at recognizing poorly constructed and more contrived images and messages. “They want a real and compelling story that avoid marketing jargon and clichés,” he noted. Steve Gustavson, group creative director at Adobe (CMO.com’s parent company), agreed. “In order to break through the marketing logjam and capture people’s attention, it’s critical to produce high-quality imagery that is emotionally impactful but have it interplay effectively with copy,” he told CMO.com. “The marriage of these two things is critical.” What makes the task incredibly difficult is the fact that Millennials—as well as Gen X and, to a lesser extent, Boomers—have increasingly short attention spans and frequently think in 140 characters or less. “There is an ongoing trend that extends back to USA Today and the MTV generation. There is a need to get to the point faster and in a more entertaining way than in the past,” Boland pointed out. Lead a person down a meandering path or to a dead end, and you have lost them, he added. U.K.-based digital agency Zabisco found that 40% of the consumer market responds better to visual information than plain text. As a result, marketers have shifted content production to include vast quantities of graphics, videos, photography, and illustrations. Infographic production, according to Zabisco, increases by 1% every day. At the same time, consumers are rapidly shifting to viewing content on mobile devices. For example, mobile traffic to YouTube rose from about 6% in 2012 to about 40% in 2014, according to BI Intelligence. Unfortunately, many marketing executives are lagging behind. Marketers are often remiss in approaching the “visual asset dialogue as part of the strategic consumer experience and engagement dialogue,” said Miller, who believes part of the problem lies in the fact that visual assets have historically resided within the domain of creative or agency resources that fall outside an organization. Consequently, the value proposition has fallen off the priority list for CMOs. In addition, many materials and content created within an organization lands in silos. “There is no unified approach or messaging,” she said. “As a result, content and materials often come across as disjointed and confusing.” CMOs and other marketing executives increasingly recognize the challenges. In a March 2015 survey conducted by Ascend2, 46% of marketing professionals worldwide indicated that videos represented the most effective content, yet 59% said it was the most difficult media to create. Similarly, 43% said infographics were effective, but 34% said they were difficult to produce. In contrast, 24% indicated that photos and illustrations are most effective, and only 8% reported they posed challenges. The CMO Council found that, ultimately, the lack of a cogent strategy is common. Only about one-quarter of survey respondents said they had a process in place to aggregate, organize, and manage visual assets used across teams, while about four in 10 said there was no conversation about centralizing these issues due to competing priorities. The Big Picture Transforming the challenge into an opportunity is critical. A starting point, Miller said, is to understand the journey—or, in...
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