How The Visual Internet Influences Advertising

Nearly 20 years ago the world was introduced to the first website ever. It was a modest venture, practically skimpy by todays standards, with just simple black and white HTML text. A few short years later Flash came along and allowed websites to feature background images and animated text. From there we saw the boom of Google image search, the first Youtube video, and the beginning of the visual internet we use today.

Myspace and Facebook were pioneers of a new and emerging industry - the social network. Our ever expanding internet could connect us instantly with people all over the world, which means our friends and family were virtually never out of reach. Made with the purpose in mind of connecting people there was one feature that shown above the rest - photo sharing. Today 3.25 billion photos are shared on social media every day. Users are so inundated with images and content that our average attention span has dropped down to eight seconds, one less than the goldfish.

Piggy backing off the success of image sharing within social networks, other apps introduced their own spin. Instagram, based on the instant camera offered a streamlined platform for mobile users simply with the purpose of sharing photos. Within Instagram the images took the front seat, whereas the caption below (if any at all) mimicked the short notes that one might find on an old polaroid.

Drawing its inspiration from a physical mood board, Pinterest cornered the market on pure visuals. Unlike Instagram or Facebook, Pinterest changed the game of social image sharing by becoming a hub of, not only things we want to look at, but things we want to buy.

At its core, social media has always been geared towards the users. For the last decade or so, weve shaped every social media platform into what we see now, and they are ever evolving - so where does branded content fit into the mix?

Because of social media, the playing field has been leveled for users and advertisers alike. Typical commercials dont make the cut anymore in this virtual world and the days of stock photography and models in studios are gone. Social media users trust user-generated content seven times more than obviously branded content. Paired with that is 56% of people are more likely to purchase a product after seeing it featured in a users photo, and even more so if its featured in a video. For marketers, the value of an impartial third party talking about their product is worth more than a multi-million dollar commercial project.

Keeping up with visuals in our online world is nearly an impossible task at its current rate. The classic structure of written content is truly no match for our modern attention span. Through eye tracking it has been discovered that web readers scan written content in an F pattern. By scanning down the left side and reading only the first one or two sentences of each paragraphs, readers are searching for the golden nuggets of information, trying to find the content they clicked for. This pattern of reading has taught web writers to change up their style. Subheads and bullet points are used more frequently, while a stanza-like pattern of writing, similar to poetry lines, has become more popular. Shorter bite sized sentences that are easily skimmed and interspersed between images and other visual content have become par for the course in web content.

Take a look at this infographic for more on how our visual internet influences us, and what that means for advertising. The ever changing environment of the web is a tricky one to navigate, but the way we view the power of images has not changed.