Images are becoming the universal language.
It is predicted there will be 7.6 billion people in the world in 2019, and about 5 billion of them will have a mobile phone. With close to 80% having a built-in camera, that’s 4 billion people taking pictures every day. And we’ve seen the proof. 10 percent of photos taken, by humankind, have been produced in the last twelve months.
Pictures have more power to enrich communication and stimulate response than text. The IAB’s In-Image Advertising Primer notes that articles with relevant photos get 94 percent more views than those without. The brain is able to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and those visuals can trigger a prevailing emotional response from the recipient. Those are just two of the many reasons why there’s such a predominant focus on images in areas such as brand advertising and news. Images currently comprise around 30 percent of the editorial content within Vibrant’s premium publishers, and this is expected to grow.
The greater presence and consumption of images online helps to explain why the next generation of digital display ads will be in-image advertising.
In-image ads tick all of the boxes of contemporary digital marketing best practice: they are an in-line, truly native format; they work cross-platform; they can be programmatically deployed at massive scale across mobile and desktop. At Vibrant we’ve seen a big uptake in the past year by some of our biggest CPG advertisers for the format. Clients appreciate the scale and viewability of buying programmatically but buy direct for the more custom, animated and highly creative functionalities.
The most viewable programmatic format?
Unlike standard banner ads that appear around content, in-image ads appear as nimble overlays placed natively at the base of contextually-relevant static editorial images. As an in-line format, a high viewability would be expected, however, the scale of that performance is remarkable. The formats also regularly attain double the industry standard.
Designed to perform
However, whilst such technical display capabilities are important for advertisers to know when purchasing ads, it’s the impact on consumers that matters most. In-image ads achieve nearly three times the industry average brand lift, according to Nielsen Online Brand Effect. The ads are so effective they generally need just three exposures or less to achieve the maximum brand lift for the ad creative.
The changing online landscape and challenges mean marketers must adopt new ad tactics for programmatic performance. In-Image advertising may be the solution. It’s viewable, it performs and it’s a visual medium that consumers like.