“Giles Goodwin does a great job describing two different ad technologies online, and where they are both heading. A key point he makes is that regardless of the technology, it is still an exercise in advertising. Therefore, it should be guided by a team trained in powerful visual communication.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Giles Goodwin Ad Week

It seems the writing’s on the wall for the banner ad.

In 2015, “banner blindness” is real and irrevocable: More than 80 percent of digital ads go ignored, while 63 percent of millennials use ad-blocking software to eliminate them entirely. Meanwhile, native-ad platforms tout that users look at their promos 52 percent more frequently than they look at banners, and are more likely to share them with others.

The conclusion feels obvious. By 2017, spending on native ads on social sites alone is expected to rise to $5 billion. Soon, native will be king, and the digital banner will join the browser pop-up in the graveyard of outdated, digital-marketing schemes.

But the obvious conclusion is the wrong conclusion. There is hope for the humble little banner. (Just look at this creative campaign from Post-It Notes in Russia, where the annoyance of banner ad retargeting was brilliantly turned into a helpful reminder service.)

New technological improvements will soon bring its content into the 21st century—enough so to challenge native advertising’s supposedly inevitable ascendance.

Don’t Blame the Banner—Blame Limited Creative

Over the past decade, ad tech has brought tremendous innovations to two components of digital ad platforms: media buying and data management. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) allow for buying media at massive scale and high precision. Supply-side platforms (SSPs) let publishers maximize their fill and yield. Data-management platforms (DMPs) support massive data sets and provide the stats used to execute targeted campaigns across the entire Internet. Ad exchanges support real-time bidding at sub-second speeds.

The last component of the banner ad—creative—hasn’t kept up with the rest of the team. (By “creative,” I mean the actual image, file, or application served up inside the banner box.) Advertisers routinely buy a million-dollar campaign with great inventory at massive scale and deliver a static ad creative that could have been served up in 1998.

That’s a huge problem. Most banner ad creative doesn’t live up to users’ expectations for what it’s like to use a modern website or app. No wonder we’ve grown to distrust them.

The tools to create better banners are already at our fingertips. Ad retargeting and dynamic creative optimization can improve the relevance of each ad’s message. Rich media replaces static images with animated and sometimes interactive graphics, often in HTML5 that works across mobile devices and desktops.

In all of these cases, however, the file that loads inside the banner box is just that, a file served up to the user. The real game-changer will be a new player in the ad-tech stack: the programmatic creative platform.

To Revive the Banner, Tech and Creative Unite

Programmatic creative platforms do more than just deliver files to users. They empower ad designers to transform banner boxes into interactive canvases—ad content that will finally live up to the user experience of the media around them. These ads provide value to the end user, whether through entertainment, an improved visual experience, interesting information, or just an opportunity to play. Their message can shift based on the user’s location, gender, and browsing habits, or even what the weather is like in their area that day.

These canvases let designers build what are essentially mini-interactive apps, which apply all the user experience innovations that the mobile app revolution has taught us. Research has shown that branded mobile apps, unlike banner ads, are often perceived by users as “useful,” and have a positive persuasive impact on the user’s interest in the brand. Imagine deploying this powerful tool directly on a website or within an article, without the need to download a full app.

Already, the tide is shifting toward these more immersive—but also more useful—types of ad experiences. The New York Times is rolling out a new mobile ad format deploying large, immersive ads at seven moments when readership spikes during the day, including lunchtime and the end of work hours. These ads will introduce content like the Times’ morning and evening briefings, and free up the rest of its mobile content from distracting (and tiny) interstitial banner ads.

This is why I’m optimistic about the future of the banner. If programmatic creative platforms gain large scale traction, we will start seeing fewer static banners, more relevant content, and increasingly compelling applications served in those banner boxes. And users will respond accordingly.

Advertising Can’t Live on Native Alone

One last reason banner ads are here to stay: Native ads will never fully replace them. Native’s ability to blend in with surrounding content has protected it from the banner’s erosion in click-through rate. But it has also imposed enormous creative constraints. Native ads don’t provide the “interactive canvas” for designers that banners do—especially banners empowered by programmatic creative platforms.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big proponent of native. But I don’t believe that its growth will be at the expense of the banner. Instead, smart advertisers and publishers will invest in new technology for both.

The next big thing in Web advertising won’t be the death of the banner—it’ll be this blended approach.

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“Getty Images is not only the world’s leading source of editorial photographic images, but they are leaders in the study and understanding of the power of visuals. It is fact that images communicate faster and with more impact than words. When combined properly, images and concise words are your most powerful sales tool, impacting every level of your company branding, including your sales team. This 2013 article from Getty is a tremendous primer on visually-driven brand impact.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Curve

We’ve all seen the statistics, and there’s no doubt that content marketing is vastly more effective when images or video are added.

Brands that use visual content have found that it encourages greater engagement with their customers. This is very understandable, as visual storytelling is something that goes back to caveman days. Visuals help us tell our stories quickly with impact and emotion. But they have to be the right visuals. And when the visual is a powerful one, be it an image or video, the effect is magnified.

Powerful visuals + evoke emotions = Deeper engagement

Powerful visuals evoke emotions, driving a deeper engagement and more profound change in behavior. So what makes an image or video powerful, so it causes an emotional reaction and encourages this deeper level of engagement that a content marketer needs to be successful?

At Getty Images, we spend a great deal of time asking ourselves  – what makes a powerful visual?

Of course the craft of the image matters – composition, lighting, style etc. But there are other factors that might not be so obvious and perhaps most people never think about.

Four factors that make a powerful visual:

1. Authenticity

The consumer wants to believe that the people they are seeing are real… what they’re doing and how they’re acting is real.  A nice example of this is the realness of Jennifer Lawrence – which fans of the Oscars loved – versus the varnished, old-Hollywood look and feel of Anne Hathaway. This real-world trend shows up in our subject-based archive as well.

At Getty Images, we’ve seen this trend play out with a change in the type of imagery we’ve been selling over the past five years. Our most popular 2007 baby versus 2012 baby shows the latter is clearly more candid. It’s not the perfect moment, but it is a real moment. And our 2007 womanversus 2012 woman shows quite a change, not just in her look, but in her attitude.

This is the kind of change we’ve seen in just five years. The visual language changes faster today than ever before thanks to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook – we can no longer think in decades – i.e. The 50’s housewife, the 80’s business man. You have to keep up or you will seem dated.

Dove is an example of a marketer that has nailed authenticity and benefitted from it.  H&M is another example, with the use of Jennie Runk, the plus-size model to demonstrate the range of sizes in its beachwear campaign. And MasterCard – real people, real moments. The hair isn’t perfect, the lighting isn’t perfect. But it works.

2. Cultural Relevancy

Diversity and inclusiveness are issues that are very culturally relevant today. Of course not everybody is on board with these or any social shifts, but if you’re a content marketer it’s usually good business not to be stuck in the past.

Even mainstream advertisers like Cheerios are willing to accept any negative reactions to achieve a deeper emotional connection. One of the more high-profile reactions to the commercial and the backlash was a customer-created Tumblr to highlight a more positive, authentic view of mixed-race families. That risk is clearly worth it when you create this kind of relationship with the consumer. It’s also not surprising that cultural relevancy and authenticity go hand in hand. 

3. Sensory Currency

This is a very strong trend right now. As technology takes over more and more of our lives, we’ve seen a desire for things that are ‘real’ like human contact and old-time, hands-on activities and professions. This trend combines nostalgia and a new appreciation for traditional skills, and seeing handmade products re-establishes the connection between maker and consumer.

Archetypes are classic characters that have been used to tell stories for hundreds, if not thousands of years – and the 12 classic archetypes are still just as powerful of a storytelling tool today.

Examples we see quite often are the hero archetype and more specifically, a Goddess of the Hunt. Recent cultural examples of this include The Hunger Games, or Disney’s Brave.

And then there’s the caregiver. Quite often the caregiver archetype today isn’t a woman at all, but the father as seen in this advertisement for Chase Private Client.  This is quite a shift socially – another example of cultural relevance.

Key takeaways

Powerful visuals evoke deeper emotions and result in a deeper engagement with your content. That’s why as a content marketer, knowing how to identify emotionally powerful images is so important. Content marketing is about telling a story and creating a closer connection to the consumer, and powerful visuals, whether they’re still images or video, make that easier and more effective.

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“Is Your Sales Team Begging For Business or Strategically Integrated?”

– Glenn Baruck/Chief Marketing Officer

The following article written by: Ian Altman, Forbes

Kelly runs a business services company. They provide exceptional service for their clients across industries. After initial meetings, Kelly and her team noticed that their potential customers would often stop returning phone calls or emails. Kelly commented that their follow-up seemed to sound like begging. They send a note or leave a message that says “Just checking in to see if you’ve made a decision yet.” Kelly asked me what they could do to stop begging for business. I explained that they needed to adapt their sales and marketing for today’s customer.

I am honored to work with companies across industries on how to grow their business. We follow a specific, consistent process to achieve results. One of the most surprising steps for many of my clients is that I insist that they align their sales and marketing organizations to ensure sharp and consistent messaging and content. The shame is that in most organizations, businesses overlook the importance of a tight connection between the two parts of the organization. When you recognize how today’s customers have evolved in their buying habits, the sales and marketing connection becomes obvious.

How We (As Customers) Buy

Research shows that more than half of the buying decision is made before actively engaging with the seller’s organization. Some research suggests that the number exceeds 70%. As a customer, when you are looking to solve an issue, do you start at a store, or do you perform a search? Over the past several years, we’ve been conditioned to search first and ask questions later.

When we find information, we seek to understand our options, uncover the expert in the field, and ultimately reduce the risk associated with our decision. If you boil those elements into a single concept, customers are seeking someone they can trust.

Sales Is Marketing – Marketing Is Sales

We used to think of marketing and sales as having two distinct roles: The Marketing Team was there to create interest and awareness. The Sales Team was supposed to build customer confidence and urgency. It doesn’t work that way anymore. As more of the buying process continues to shift online, you have a huge opportunity to build customer confidence and uncover urgency through content.

Marcus goes on to say that when companies resist the notion of embracing content marketing, it’s often because someone internally seeks approval for “content marketing.” There are likely very few CEOs waking up thinking “We should do more content marketing,” adds Sheridan. Being the most respected teacher in the space, on the other hand, might help get people on board.

Where Do You Begin

What are the questions your ideal customers might ask that would indicate they would need your help? If you sell regulatory services, your ideal customer might wonder “How do I know if I am in compliance with certain regulations?” If you sell web design services, your ideal client might ask “How to increase web traffic to your business website?” These questions become great headlines for articles. When you seek information, do you want biased information, or unbiased? If you said “biased,” stop reading and turn in your secret decoder ring. Since you want unbiased information, so does your customer. Where do you get the questions?

Your sales and customer service teams are regularly in front of customers. They receive multiple questions per day. Ask them for the questions they hear most often. The good news is that those same people on your team regularly answer those questions. With a brief discussion, you’ll have the information you need for valuable content.

How To Integrate Marketing And Sales

Once you have created great content, you are now armed with great tools for follow-up. This means that instead of saying “Hey, just checking in to see if you’ve made a decision, yet…” You can send a note that says “When we met, you asked a great question about driving traffic to your website. I’ve included a link to an article that might be helpful. Once you’ve had a chance to review the article, please let me know if you have questions.”

Great content helps to not only attract the right customers, but serves as a valuable tool for maintaining a conversation and building confidence and trust with your potential clients. The key, however, is to ensure that your sales organization is feeding relevant topics to marketing, and then using that content as part of a follow-up strategy with clients. Marcus Sheridan and I are conducting a joint half-day workshop at Content Marketing World in Cleveland on September 8, 2015 on this very topic. If you are attending, please send me any topics you’d like to discuss in advance.

Next Steps

Pull your team together to brainstorm on the top questions customers are asking. Think about what concerns your clients might have about doing business with you. Be sure to create content (text, or video, and/or audio) to address each issue. Once you have the foundation for content, be sure to arm your team with the links to share with your customers. You’ll be amazed at how much trust you can build just by addressing common questions with honesty and transparency. If you decide to ignore integrating sales and marketing, then invest in cardboard signs, markers, and tin cups since you’ll be doing plenty of begging for business.

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“This article from Chad Brooks of Business News Daily provides good support for getting the most from your email campaigns. But here is a key point not covered: Effective emails can function as simple vivid visual ‘posters’; not columns of text. We have seen great results for clients when they follow this Visually Driven approach. For email to work, it should not look like standard email fare. And, your email title must be a very intriguing teaser.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Chad Brooks, Business News Daily

With more than 90 percent of consumers checking their email on a daily basis, businesses are quickly realizing this is one of the best ways to reach their target audience.

Whether it’s to spread company news, promote a sale or highlight new products and services, companies are finding great value in their email marketing efforts.

“2014 showed email’s continuing momentum as the best marketing tool to drive (return on investment),” Dan Forootan, president of StreamSend Email Marketing, said in a statement.

To help businesses improve their email marketing campaigns and make sure their efforts are paying off, StreamSend offers a number of tips.

• Measure it: One of the greatest aspects of email marketing is just how easily it can be measured. Take advantage of tools that show who read what and where and who didn’t as a way to best determine when to build on successful efforts or fix lagging results.
• Use video: Adding videos to emails increases return on investment and monthly revenue by 40 percent. Additionally, click-through rates increase by as much as 3 times when marketers include a video in an email.
• Go mobile: Mobile devices offer marketers a way to reach customers wherever and whenever they want. However, this makes creating a solid campaign more critical than ever, since the email will often be judged with just one glance.
• Increase open rates: To make an impact, emails need to stand out. Review open rates to see which emails are getting the most interest from your consumers. Make sure each email is serving the customer.
• Be recognizable: Since you may have only a second or two to grab your customer’s inbox attention, use a consistent look, format and subject line to make it easy for them to recognize your emails.
• Click-through: Since click-through rates gauge your success, be sure to make your call to action loud and clear so consumers have a reason to click on your links. You also need to measure links clicked to guide future content.
• RSS feeds: Businesses with regular RSS updates – syndicated live Web feeds — can more effectively connect with their audiences and attract new followers. Sharing RSS content allows organizations to multiply their number of readers, which helps draw in more customers in the long run.
• Use templates: Often the easiest and most reliable way to send emails with a branded look and optimize reader response is to take advantage of email templates.
• Add social: Emails that include social-sharing buttons have a click-through rate 158 percent higher than emails that don’t. Adding social media to an email strategy can produce large campaign results.
• Bottom line: When creating email campaigns, ensure they align with your overall business goals so you can best guide content and strategies.

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“James Balm does a good job of framing the powerful use of visuals for an industry that is historically verbose: Medicine. Whatever your industry, communicating with visuals helps you impact people faster and with more emotion. And every brand and sale has an emotional, human component.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: James Balm, BioMed Central

We’ve all heard the cliché, “a picture tells a thousand words”, but there is real value in using images to promote scientific content. Images help us learn, images grab attention, images explain tough concepts, and inspire.

Why do we love images so much?
We are very visual creatures. A large percentage of the human brain dedicates itself to visual processing. Our love of images lies with our cognition and ability to pay attention. Images are able to grab our attention easily; we are immediately drawn to them. Think about this blog, for example: did you look at the words first, or the image?

We process images at an alarming speed. When we see a picture, we analyze it within a very short snippet of time, knowing the meaning and scenario within it immediately. The human brain is able to recognize a familiar object within 100 milliseconds. People tend to recognize familiar faces within 380 milliseconds, which is pretty speedy.

Bright colors capture our attention because our brains are wired to react to them. Our vision senses are by far our most active of the senses. This may be thanks to our evolution. Quick processing of visual information would have saved our ancestors from the attack of a predator or during a hunt for food. A gatherer would need to be able to identify certain shades of red berries during their forage. These primitive behaviors come into play even now in our everyday lives. This is often a fact that advertisers use to their advantage.

Images on social media
As Social Media Assistant at BioMed Central, one thing I’ve realized is how vital images are in my role. A post on social media accompanied by an image is likely to receive engagement. Visuals are one way of grabbing your audience’s attention and gaining interaction, especially on Facebook. With this in mind, you can use these images to drive users to research.

And what if you have limited characters to write with? Twitter only allows users 140 characters of text, which can sometimes make it difficult to convey a complex message. With an image, you can help explain these tough concepts without taking up too much space. Here’s an example:

Images also have the potential to get an emotional response from your audience. This is necessary when if you want the work you’re promoting to have an impact on users.

Tumblr
We are seeing plenty of researchers and institutions taking advantage of images, especially through the microblogging service, Tumblr. Publishers, institutes, researchers, and schools are using Tumblr to promote scientific findings, with the help of vibrant and appealing images. Tumblr is also a great way to bring awareness to the research itself.

There is a selection of brilliant Tumblr blogs for science communication. There’s the Great blog, providing bite-sized bioscience highlights. You can get your daily dose of biomedical images with the MRC’s Biomedical Picture of the Day (BPoD) blog. Meanwhile, Biocanvas, the blog, unleashes the true beauty of science with dazzling photos that could easily be pieces of artwork. After something more unusual? Try this scientific illustration Tumblr.

With this in mind, we have started our own BioMed Central Tumblr, for scientific and medical images. We want to show that science can be beautiful.

Images help educate
In a world where we are bombarded by stimuli, we often seek the easiest and most fluent way of acquiring and learning information. Reading can be a slow and time-consuming activity. It takes a lot longer to read a long sentence than to analyze a visual scene.
At school we are expected to scour our textbooks and memorize sentences word-for-word. This isn’t always the best tactic. Many of us are visual learners, who memorize content more effectively if it happens to be image-based.

This is what makes infographics so popular: they crunch down data and findings and present them in an easy to digest manner.
The images, diagrams, and figures in infographics make the learning process more fluid.  Funnily enough, here’s an infographic explaining why we all love infographics.

Images help tell a story
Sometimes scientific findings, even the important ones, just don’t seem personal to us as individuals. People may not feel concerned about a certain disease or condition because they are not emotionally invested in it. Now, this isn’t because we’re all stone hearted monsters. It’s because sometimes these findings just aren’t reaching out to us in the way they ought to.

Images help us become involved. With images, we are seeing the science, rather than standing on the outskirts. The images help contribute to the can make science more engaging.

Do-It-Yourself (or ask a friend)
Just because you’re not an artist, doesn’t mean you’re banned from doodling. Art and science are not mutually exclusive. Sketching out a diagram, comic strip, or illustration, can help provide yet another channel to explain complex work.
“But I’m terrible at drawing”, I hear you say. Well, you don’t have to be a brilliant artist to help get your message across. People appreciate custom content, no matter its quality or its execution, as long as the information is reliable.

Thanks to open access and open data, we are able to construct infographics and custom content with raw information. With all these findings being open to the public, we are able to combine these ingredients and create a visual product that will engage and educate others: another way to put this research to good use.

Images are a vital part of science communication, and shouldn’t be cast out in favor of long blocks of text. In order to break down the often complex messages of science, we need the help of visuals.

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“This concise viewpoint from Daniel Newman bridges consumer products and business-to-business in a way that reminds us about our own unique targets. The simple list provided is applicable now, while also pointing to future trends.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Daniel Newman, Forbes

Marketers are constantly looking into the future, trying to predict the next big trend, be it for their brands or their clients. Naturally, marketers are preoccupied with questions like: What is the next big campaign? How can we turn our client into the “next big thing”? What is the next hot trend going to be in retail? Etc.  Everyone wants to the answers. Knowing this, what do some of the top minds in marketing predict for their own futures? A recent article by Jeff Beer on Fast Company Create collected 25 future trends that will change the marketing landscape five years from now based on top innovators in marketing and advertising. After reading this, I started to ponder what I saw as the top trends driving marketing.

Here are the 10 trends that I think are going to have the biggest impact on the future of marketing.

1. Mobile is going to become the center of marketing. From cell phones to smartphones, tablets to wearable gadgets, the evolution of mobile devices is one of the prime factors influencing the marketing world. As the focus is shifting to smaller screens, brands will be able to strike up a more personalized relationship with their customers by leveraging the power of mobile.

2. Transparency will dictate brand-customer relationships. Currently, customers are seeking more engagement from brands. This trend will continue with customers becoming more demanding in their expectation of transparency. Genuine brands – the ones that “walk the talk” and create real value – will be rewarded. This means brands that still haven’t made their customer dealings transparent are headed to a future of doom.

3. The need for good content will not slow down. Ever. Content, particularly visual content, will rule the roost in the online marketing world, evolving into various forms and disrupting the conventional marketing models. Moreover, the speed at which a brand can create amazing content will play a part in their success.

4. User-generated content will be the new hit. The power of user-generated content will surpass branded content as brands begin to relinquish control of their own brands’ marketing to their customers. From online reviews, to social media posts and blogs, this means there will be a strong need for brands to create a positive impact in their consumers’ minds. In response to this model of content production, content co-creation between brands and consumers will become a popular trend.

5. Social will become the next Internet. Social will become an integral part of the “broader marketing discipline.” As its impact grows stronger, most brands will fully transition their marketing efforts to social channels. As such, social has the full potential to become not just one of the channels but the channel.

6. Brands will own their audience. By cultivating brand community and entering into direct conversations with their customers, brands will begin to own their audience in a way that will create loyalists and brand advocates. In the future of marketing, branding and marketing efforts will have their seeds rooted in what customers are talking about. The customers’ responses and feelings toward the brand will dictate future campaigns. Essentially, if the customers are happy, they’ll gladly wear the marketer’s hat and do what is needed to bring their favorite brand in focus.

7. Brands solely-focused on Millennials will go out of relevance. Brands will need to understand that the millennials are not a niche “youth” segment but a generation of people who will ultimately give way to a newer generation. Therefore, millennial-focused brands will have to change their game to stay relevant.

8. Good brands will behave like product companies and not like service companies. While service companies aim to create a happy customer and look forward to a contract renewal, product companies thrive on innovation. So, for brands of the future, customer satisfaction and retention will not be enough. They will need to innovate more efficiently to create more value for their customers. However, great service will NEVER go out of style.

9. Personalized, data-driven marketing will become more refined. There is a difference between data-driven marketing and intrusive marketing. While the former is based on relationship-building, the latter is nothing but old-school push marketing wrapped in a new cover. The difference between these two formats will become even more prominent in future. Marketers who focus on relationship building will be rewarded, while intruders will be shut out.

10. More accurate metrics will surface. What most brands do in the name of measuring marketing success is look at hollow “vanity” metrics such as likes, shares, or tweets. Even in terms of data mining, we are still developing more sophisticated means to capture the right data. Many ideas are hypothesized, but few are practical. The future will witness the rise of better analytical tools to help marketers gauge the success of their campaigns.

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