Packed with unique insights, pro tips, and customer stories, our fourth annual State of Visual Media report is here to help you and your brand thrive in today’s visual economy.
For this year’s report, our data science team analyzed more than 219 billion transactions per month generated by 375 of the world’s top brands across 13 vertical industries.
The appetite for visual media continues to grow. As consumers we have come to expect fast and flawless images and video shopping online, and we’ll abandon a site if it’s not living up to our expectations.
Our data overwhelmingly backs up these trends. This year’s report revealed a 25% growth in visual media bandwidth and 37% higher video traffic across retail and e-commerce. The travel industry saw a more than 50% increase in video usage as companies attempted to capitalize on the post-pandemic travel boom.
The big question for brands is this: will the breakneck pace of visual media’s growth be a business catalyst or tech bottleneck? The glaring conclusion from our study is that brands must look to automation to harness visual media’s power as a catalyst. And those that do are reaping a wide range of benefits.
Let’s start with revenue. Brands like Dune London report bringing new products to online markets faster by using automation to manage their whole visual media lifecycle on an ‘epic scale’. This keeps customers engaged and coming back for more, leading to higher conversion rates, and healthier profit margins.
On the flip side, brands using automation are also reaping productivity and efficiency gains. A crucial piece of this is freeing up scarce and valuable IT and creative talent in a tight and competitive labor market. They’re also slashing IT resources like cloud storage, lowering their costs, and carbon footprints. A top international sports apparel brand featured in this report was able to reduce bandwidth consumption by 40% from 6.8 TB per day to 4.05 TB per day. Annualized, this was equivalent to taking more than 400 gas-powered cars from the road!
Also in the report, we take a look at how the so-called ‘no normal’ economy is impacting brands and why they must be nimble enough to act and react, fast., how social networks peak and trough, how global influencers can instigate massive viral buying trends, and how Millennials and Gen Z shoppers rely on video-first when making buying decisions.
Constantly changing consumer behavior means that visual media must perform well and consistently across an ever-growing mix of consumer devices, software, social networks, and browsers. The study is rich with data to animate this changing landscape. It also highlights brands like Paul Smith, which decided that they couldn’t afford to be locked into inflexible technology and are migrating to a MACH architecture.
Dig in to our State of Visual Media Report today. We’re confident it will help you fine-tune your web strategy to ensure that visual media is a catalyst for growth — not a bottleneck — in these turbulent economic times.
