Visuals have been a marketer’s best friend for a while now, but now with AI in tow, the visual experience has been taken to the next level (or two) and there’s no looking back now—highly optimized video and other imagery are dominant and critical components of the overall online experience. New research from image and video technology platform Cloudinary offers an in-depth look into how the world’s most engaging brands are harnessing the power of visual content to deliver more compelling and profitable digital experiences, at scale.
The firm’s fifth annual State of Visual Media Report also provides insights into the major role AI continues to play in image and video optimization, the visual experience “must haves” when it comes to Gen Z consumers, and the near global dominance of mobile-first experiences. In addition, the report, representing an analysis of 8.5 trillion visual asset transactions across 439 global brands, also reveals how properly optimized visual content is helping brands greatly reduce their digital carbon footprints.
Generative AI continues to take hold
This year’s report reveals that brands were exceptionally fast to adopt new AI capabilities. Generative AI is not only helping to bridge the labor shortage of web developers, but it’s also freeing tech teams to do more strategic work and be more productive. After analyzing just one month of data across 180,000 users, the firm determined that AI automation features saved customers an average of 34 working days.
Website carbon footprint a key consideration
As consumers raise expectations for their favorite brands to operate more sustainably in the face of the climate crisis, CIOs and CMOs are finding ways to optimize their online images and videos as part of the solution. A company’s website can contribute to a large carbon footprint with bandwidth-hungry images and videos, as serving and storing them demands servers that need power to run and be cooled. Visual media optimization is showing to be a clever solution. If we look at just one month of the sample data in this year’s report, CO2 savings, thanks to optimization, were impressive: each customer saved an average of 5,342kg of CO2, roughly the same as 5 long-haul flights.
Mobile is king
Three industries dominate reaching customers via mobile devices over desktops: retail and consumer goods (75.3 percent), food and beverage (73.1 percent), and financial services (63.5 percent). While mobile has emerged as the preferred way to browse the web in most countries, there are still major geographical differences: 76 percent of media requests in Mexico originate from mobile, and just 41 percent in Japan. In terms of demographics, and according to the firm’s recent e-commerce survey, Gen Z (73 percent) consumers primarily shop online using their smartphones, and these digital natives aged 11-26 are also the most likely group to use a brand’s app to shop (26 percent).
Images and video are the story
“Since our inaugural report, the world has seen unprecedented global events and seismic shifts in demographics and social attitudes transforming consumer expectations and market behavior,” said Genevieve Haldeman, vice president of corporate marketing at Cloudinary, in a news release. “This year’s report offers an in-depth look into the ways in which brands are managing and delivering image and video content to meet these challenges. From retail to publishing, travel to entertainment, one consistent thread remains. When it comes to successfully engaging today’s consumer, images and video no longer play leading roles in the story. They are the story. What was once considered a leg up is now table stakes and something brands must get right.”
Download the full report here.
For its 2023 report, Cloudinary analyzed the visual content engagement patterns from August 2022 through August 2023 across 439 Cloudinary customers, a dozen vertical industries and over 8.5 trillion transactions.
