On Tuesday we gathered 60 friends from the publishing
community – execs from Conde Nast, Viacom, Thompson Reuters, Wenner, NBC,
American Media, Time Warner, Getty, Dow Jones, Gannett, the IAB and others – for
an afternoon deep-dive into the rising role of image content as publishing
moves to digital and mobile platforms.
Our first “Imagesphere Summit.” (Official release here.)
Our CFO suspected it was just an excuse to order
Luminate-logo’d pillows. But most
people, I think, actually came to learn from industry peers how to hone their
image strategies. Given that more than a
third of the web’s pixels are image content, 70% of social media activity
revolves around a photo, and many of these publishers are seeing upwards of 60%
of their pageviews coming from photo galleries, there’s an eagerness across the
industry to figure out the image opportunity.
Steve Rubel, EVP
at Edelman, kicked off the programming.
He identified a schism dividing the landscape of digital publishers. On one side the “Continental Content Divide”
publishers focus on “spreadable media,” using infographics, lists and
slideshows – short, frequent and easy-to-share content nuggets – to fuel
success among social media consumers. On
the other side of the divide are practitioners of “drillable media,” where
depth, context and rich visual experience are designed to pull readers deeper
into the story. At the center of both
approaches (represented by the Play Button in his Media Cloverleaf) is content
that directly addresses the visual culture.
(More at Steve’s
site.)
Paul Asel,
managing partner at Nokia Growth Partners (and a Luminate board member) shared
a global perspective: How mobile and touch screens are accelerating growth of
the Imagesphere. Half the photos ever
taken by humankind, he told us, were taken in the past 2 years. He also shared
a prediction about the future of digital photos: Today if you hand a non-touch screen
device to a child, she’ll ask, Is it broken? Soon all of us will ask the
same question if we find ourselves starting at a static image.
Bob Lisbonne,
Luminate’s CEO, presented a deck entitled “Welcome to the Imagesphere.” He
posited a theory of photo evolution, where the Kodak Era has given way to the
Imagesphere – a new phase in which technology has streamlined our ability to
take, share and interact with photos. Members
of Facebook alone upload more than 300 million pictures a day, and our
sprawling social graphs mean that we each (on average) have access to nearly
100,000 photos shared by friends.
Imagesphere technologies have enabled digital and mobile publishers to use
photos in 3 new ways – as repositories of hidden information that can be
revealed with the swipe of a mouse; as drivers or richer experiences; and as a
new paradigm for navigation. An effective image strategy creates
publisher value via more inventory, higher user engagement, and new
monetization.
Bob also proposed
that we borrow a concept from fighter jets, "heads-up display," to
imagine a richer experience for digital photos.
Heads-up displays allow fighter pilots to watch their gauges without
looking down at the instrument panel – relevant data appears as an overlay to
visual content outside the windscreen. When an image has "stopping
power" and sparks reader demand for more information, don't force them to
look down, look elsewhere on the page, or (god forbid) click off your
site to get answers elsewhere. Interactive images can mimic the
"heads-up display," providing your readers answers right inside the
image experience.
Rafat Ali,
founder and former editor-in-chief of PaidContent (now doing the same at
Skift), interviewed Steve Carpi, the global director of production Fantasy
Interactive. They discussed FI’s
partnership with Gannett around the recent re-design of USA TODAY.
Touch screens are training media consumers to navigate by way of photos instead
of headlines, Steve said, and websites that steal from tablet design will be
better positioned for the next wave of mobile and desktop user
experience. It’s an approach he called “tactile design.” Rafat provoked
an interesting discussion around two questions:
One, now that every story is an image, are image galleries dead? Two, with images moving into such a central
role in publishing, will important stories will be lost if they don't have a
compelling picture to pull in readers?
(An audience member from Getty volunteered to help!)
Advice from Liz
Coughlin, former head of the entertainment sites at Yahoo (now at Young
Hollywood): You can either try to push your readers to content types that you
know how to monetize (eg, articles with large IAB units) or you can figure out
how to monetize the content they love, which tends to be your photos.
Brandon
Whightsel, design director for WSJ Digital, started with a shot of the newspaper
in 1889, the year it began publishing. Beyond turning a five-column
format into six columns and the introduction of those iconic woodcut images,
though, the paper’s look and feel evolved only gradually until 2003 when it introduced
color photos. WSJ Digital, however, has evolved at a radically faster pace. A large photo element across the top of the
website – the "Assassination Module," Whightsel called it – was once
reserved only for very, very big stories.
The importance of images on the tablet experience, however, has changed
the design rules. Large photos now
anchor many digital and tablet stories, even when no one has been assassinated.
Whightsel tipped his hat to Rupert Murdoch as an outspoken advocate for
the migration to a more visual approach to publishing.
Offir
Gutelzon, business development VP at Getty, talked about the potential
unleashed by image metadata. Once a
publisher knows what’s inside each image, it can automatically deliver photos
relevant to every story and can attach ads targeted by image context.
Luminate CTO
James Everingham wrapped up the afternoon with a sneak peek at some products
Luminate will launch later this fall – support for new content types, upgraded
social features, new controls for publishers and users, and some snazzy
functionality for tablet users.
Throughout
the day there were more questions than the speakers had time to answer. I guess we’ll just have to do another one of
these soon.
(Originally posted on ChasNote)
