Luminate Corporate Blog

We agree – "It’s all about the images”

This week, MDG Advertising, released a cool infographic about images and the shift to "the visual.” They bring up some excellent points about how "it's all about the images,” a key focus point for our Luminate team. With almost 2B camera phones sold and more than 300M photos uploaded daily, 10% of the worlds images have been posted online in the past 12 months showing validation for our love/passion for images and proof to our visual culture. 

One of my favorite lines from this infographic is "Images make everything online better." They really do! MDG points out the major social media changes in the last 6 months that have been geared around images; Pinterest, Facebook Timeline, and the $1B acquisition of Instagram. Two others we should keep in mind are the recent Face.com purchase by Facebook and the rise of Tumblr with an emphasis on photos. One might ask, "why such a craze and emphasis on photos?"  

As MDG points out, articles that include photos have 94% more total views than articles without images, the online views for press releases increase 14% if photos are included, a 60% increase in the likelihood of a consumer visiting a local business or purchasing a product online, and a 19% increase in social engagement on Facebook. In looking at the numbers, it makes sense to direct an emphasis on images and continue to see the engagement of these social platforms rise. However, there still seems to be something missing. What if you could increase engagement even more? At Luminate, we believe you can by taking the next step and making images interactive. 

By making images interactive, we found that on average consumers spend an additional 9 seconds browsing, sharing or shopping within the images on their favorite publishers. If they share, an average of 4 new users will return to the publishers’ page. Consumers also engage with an advertiser’s branding higher than the industry standard because we can tie brand messaging within engaged and relevant images.

Join us in the next step to making images online even better – Interactive Images. 

 

Photo courtsey of a Luminate team member

Images Evoke Curiosity

Our CRO, Chas Edwards was interviewed by David Kaplan from AdExchanger about how Brand Advertisers Look Better In Images -Not Text 

Chas explains how…

"We see the opportunity to help brands that have photo assets, that have their own Tumblr pages, Instagram feeds, things that are more image-heavy than text-heavy, and we see brands are starting to develop an image strategy for their advertising. If we can marry that with better distribution and ad strategy, we can help bring them a business model for their gallery content. The ultimate winner is the consumer. After all, television is still the biggest single ad medium and that's all about images. At the end of the day, brands that want to talk to someone in image mode, and with the internet, much of that conversation is starting to happen around photos."

Another interesting element of any discussion about images vs. text is the way that images create more questions than answers.

The rapid increase in online images holds great promise because images provide such a natural way of absorbing information, but images don't just answer questions; images also raise them.

Images evoke curiosity. Who? What? When? Where? Why? In the same way that text-rich web pages are designed to provide answers for users, the transition from text to imagery will have to address the questions that images raise.

As humans, we serve as the very best image processors available. We look at something, and we either immediately know what it is or we can form a question about it. Unfortunately, our brains don't connect directly to the Internet and can't immediately access all the world’s knowledge, so we sometimes have additional work to do to answer those questions.

At Luminate, our goal is to get the consumer from question to answer as easily as possible. This is not a simple problem. In fact, any one image can generate almost an infinite number of questions.

Not to fear. There is hope!

The more data we can extract from an individual image, the better chance we will have at helping to answer those questions.  Luminate extracts information by using a combination of algorithms and human judgment. The key is to extract the most important data first and make it accessible to interesting and informative applications. Additionally, we are learning what questions people ask, so we can target more efficiently the data we extract.

The number of questions that need answers will increase significantly as people get even more instant access to pictures. We have a lot of work to do, but as Chas points out the “ultimate winner will be the consumer."

Hair Shares

Last week Larry, Twitter's fluttering bluebird, opted for a hair cut in his newest logo form. He must have learned that hair can impact image engagement rates and his blue locks were holding him back.

Across the Luminate platform, we often see consumers engaging heavily with images of stylish women. We've also discovered that images that feature women with light hair colors (blonde and red) generate 38% higher user engagement than images featuring women with darker hair shades (black and brown). Who knows if  blondes really have more fun -- but people seem captivated enough to share their images more than others.

In addition, we see that more glamorous images of women, such as high-fashion Red Carpet photos, trigger 17% higher user engagement than images depicting women in everyday life. 

Fox Sports and Luminate Team Up on Stats App for Images

Today Fox Sports and Luminate rolled out a co-developed image app that brings player stats to photos across FoxSports.com, starting with the galleries in the NBA section.

Anthony Ha at TechCrunch says we’ve finally expanded beyond the label some reporters have attached to us, the “AdSense for Images.”

This is a pretty far cry from what Luminate was doing originally, which was automatically tagging fashion and entertainment images with relevant e-commerce links (so that you could see a photo of snazzy red coat, then click to buy it). The company hasn’t abandoned that idea, but it’s thinking bigger than that — last year it launched a platform for a variety of different image apps. That’s the same platform that Luminate and FoxSports used to build their current integration.

TechCrunch asked me what Fox Sports gets out of the partnership, to which I replied:

Luminate delivers value to publishers in three ways: increasing audience engagement, growing traffic by plugging images into their social strategies, and boosting revenue through advertising around the image apps. An important part of our philosophy, though, is that we always prioritize the consumer experience first, which is why the initial focus here is the stats content. The best ad-supported businesses are ones built around high-quality, deeply engaging content experiences. Opportunities for brands will follow shortly.

Something else I like about this new app: It turns each sports photo into a living, auto-updating replacement to those cardboard baseball cards I had as a kid. Now when you check out any image of your favorite player — even one from last week or last season — you’re always getting the current snapshot of his or her performance. The only thing lost is that stiff piece of gum they used to include inside each pack of cards.

reposted from ChasNote