New media models picture perfect?

Jon Stubley
By Jon Stubley | 27 April 2016
 
GumGum VP ANZ Sales, Jon Stubley

Photos have always had the power to evoke emotion like few other visual stimuli, but while strong visuals have been critical to most forms of advertising they haven’t been used as advertising real estate in digital. That is until now thanks to the arrival of the era of the visual web.

Faster upload and download speeds (NBN issues non-withstanding) have radically changed what is possible image wise on the web across all devices and this, in turn, is fundamentally changing the way we search and consumer media. For many this means that images are becoming the primary medium with text becoming secondary.

Take for example the ascent of Instagram, which is now more popular than Twitter, has some 400+ million users and more than two billion images posted online every single day. Short-form video isn’t far behind, with Facebook users viewing eight billion videos per day – a figure that has doubled in a mere six months.

Not surprisingly a number of publishers are redesigning their sites to put the image front and centre. Quartz is now 63% image (in terms of pixels) with image slices that span the entire page to characterise the headlines and abstracts. More will follow, replacing outdated digital asset management systems with up to date technical platforms.

The rise and rise of images is also great news for advertiser as it translates to a step change in how ads can and will be served. The visual web means that ads can now be served ‘in image’, meaning brands can serve contextual ads over editorial photos and visuals. First moving companies like Snapchat are maintaining their personal relationship with their eye wateringly large global user base (over a hundred million daily users and counting) by eschewing banner, pop-ups and video ads for a more holistic in-image advertising experience.

More mainstream publishers looking to address the impact social media, programmatic trading and plunging CPM’s is having on their business models will also be early adopters, taking advantage of the ability to monetise their editorial images without cannibalising their existing digital advertising.

But while the opportunities are huge for the visual web the issues of cost, copyright and the rise of mobile devices have the potential to slow momentum – in the short term at least.

Copyright and cost are a double hander. Large brands and online publishers typically use libraries of stock photographs for all but the most important of their advertising campaigns/stories and while there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach it means the images are generic and the copyright can limit usage options. To grab attention and audience interest brands (and publishers) will need to make the effort and expense to commission custom photography or leverage user generated content on social media and brands.

This is amplified even further when it comes to the difficulty of addressing the small sizes of mobile screens. So while they marketers and publishers will be working find a beautiful image for their desktop activations, they’ll also need to consider one that can work on mobile screens. More often than not 'converting' an image from desktop to mobile isn’t as straightforward as a simple resizing, instead requiring the removing some elements of the image. This has the potential to create some issues for programmatic advertising in particular because responsive creative ads need to adjust to the various devices they are being featured on.

It’s fair to say the Australian market is at the beginning of the in-image advertising revolution but Snapchat and a slew of international brands are already showing what is possible. And for those of you who may think the visual web is just a passing fad - I’d recommend taking a few minutes to read a great article by venture capitalist Mark Suster. His stand-out quote for me is “if you’re stuck thinking these are just kids sending stupid pictures to each other then you’re stuck in the past and simply won’t understand new media and how it is changing.”

The times are indeed a changing and now is not the time to remain stuck in the past.

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