The human brain can process images in as little as 13 milliseconds, according to research from MIT. That’s a lot faster than earlier studies, which suggested it takes 100 milliseconds. Fact is, visuals are just easier to consume.
This isn’t a secret to marketers. It’s the reason images have always been a huge mainstay in advertising, as well as the driving force behind the tidal wave of photos and image-based content shared on social networks — as many as 500 million per day, according to last year’s Internet trends report from Mary Meeker.
Images have surpassed text as the currency of choice in social conversations. Just look at the influx of new image-based social networks and the massive growth and value of Instagram, Pinterest, SnapChat, Vine, and Tumblr for brands. Twitter and Facebook encourage the use of images too because, as socially savvy people know, posts with an image get more views and shares.
Brands are actually using Instagram as a mainstream advertising platform as well. In fact, some of the biggest consumer brands in the world – Nordstrom, for example – now count Instagram as one of their three or four core social platforms along with Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Looking ahead, as brands experiment with virtual reality innovations like Oculus Rift and Google Glass, we can expect new kinds of visual experiences that will look and feel quite different than what’s being created presently— heading toward immersive and multi-sensory.
Today there are a handful of standalone listening and analytics tools for networks like Pinterest but, on the whole, today’s social media listening and measurement platforms are built for a textual world, with limited abilities to fully register the nuances of visuals. This means there’s an enormous chunk of visual Web content that is not being fully “heard.”
Here are six reasons why we can expect visual listening to become a top priority for savvy brands in 2015:
1. Following the money
Brands rely on campaigns targeting bloggers and influencers to organically build buzz among followers on image-based social networks, and it’s a tactic that works incredibly well. But now, Pinterest and Instagram are introducing advertising with the goal of dramatically monetizing their currently-bare bottom lines. There are several recent reports that show Pinterest is pricing CPMs at $30-40 and that Instagram’s CPMs will also be on the high-end, with month-long campaigns starting at $350,000 and up. In the coming months and year, we can expect to see major brands diverting advertising spends from traditional channels like TV into image-based social networks to up their game and stand apart from the competition. After all, glossy and gorgeous imagery is easily transferred to digital and social campaigns. Where there’s money spent, there is always the need for analytics and measurement in order to optimize and prove ROI.
2. Brand protection
Brands have enormous vested interest in knowing where and how their images are being used and shared — deliberately or otherwise — and to glean insights about people’s relationships with, and reactions to, their content. Equally important, visual listening will help brands ensure that other parties are not misusing their images.
3. Serendipitous insights
Visual listening will open up a world of insights and new business opportunities by discovering more about the moments in which branded images are used in relation to other images, content, and social markers. Using visual listening, you’ll be able to spot patterns and correlations that could lead to serendipitous discoveries, fuel new under-the-surface campaigns, reveal untapped audiences and stimulate product development ideas. For example, imagine the great campaign a sunglasses brand could create during the summer months while beachgoers share selfie upon selfie in their shades – just one more angle to exploit.
4. Tech innovation
Data science has come a long way. In the not-so-distant future, the industry will innovate to make it possible to train a computer to recognize the difference between an image of a dog and a cat. It could even be sophisticated and powerful enough to discern a highly nuanced brand signal, like the crown within the Starbucks logo or the leaf at the top of Apple’s logo. We already know that Facebook is using some pretty advanced image-recognition technology to identify faces in photos and images posted. These kinds of leaps in technology will unleash the potential and sophistication of visual listening.
5. Emotions front and center
Emojis, emoticons, and stickers are an integral part of our social vernacular as well as everyday conversations on text and chat. In 2014, the Unicode Consortium introduced approximately 250 brand new “pictographic symbols,” including such recognizable additions as the middle finger and the Vulcan salute. Recently, Apple released an update with almost nothing new other than emojis. Since emojis are technically code, not images, they can already be measured through standard textual tools but for brands, the visual listening (and learning) opportunity lies in understanding how emojis are used contextually, alongside their logos and images.
6. Command centers as real-time visual listening sources
As the social environment matures, it’s safe to say that command centers will spread as a mainstream business tool. By tapping into unified views of textual and visual listening in a totally engaging way, marketers will create a compelling source of social intelligence and action.
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How far off is this fantastic future of visual listening? Not very far! Today there are a few standalone social image-based listening and analytics solutions but the true future – and power – of visual listening will happen when it proves possible to mesh textual and visual social listening together - even becoming a reality within the next six to eight months. Just imagine if we could add audio to this mix and create truly multi-sensory — even immersive — social listening. Now that’s something to watch out for.
