Visual Content is Dead: Why Cookie-Cutter Content is Becoming Outdated, and What’s Replacing It
Imagine you’re about to mail your list. Or post an article to your blog. Or publish a new brochure or white paper.
What’s your first choice to illustrate your content: stock photos, or custom images made for your project? The same images everyone else has, or unique visuals made and edited by a professional?
The answer’s obvious. Custom photos are always better than stock ones. If you want to look credible and convince your audience, they’re what you want.
The same goes for off-work communications. In social apps and messengers, unique images are more expressive than stock ones. This is why apps like WeChat and Telegram have expanded to include custom stickers, and why WhatsApp lets you draw over photos.
But even though we know all this, we’ve yet to see micro content personalization on a mass scale. GIFs, emojis and stickers are ubiquitous — but unique, personalized GIFs, emojis and stickers are still rare.
The question is, why?
Personalized content works better. Microcontent is booming. Why aren’t users, marketers and organizations personalizing microcontent en masse yet?
This article will give you the answer by breaking down the 3 reasons stopping personalized GIFs, stickers, emojis and other microcontent types from reaching mass adoption. But first, let’s talk about how content became so important in the first place.
The Rise of Content
In his 1996 essay, Bill Gates famously wrote: Content is King. He predicted that content would become the main driver of digital revenue — and he wasn’t wrong.
First came the blogs. In the 90s and early 00s, the internet was mostly text-based; users wanted content they could read. This made blogs and magazines an important part of the online experience. Today, 2 million blog posts are published each and every day.
Then, the internet got faster. Consumers got more bandwidth and bigger data packets. This made it so users could download videos, images and other data-dense content forms — and changed the internet forever.
The first major disruptor was Napster. That particular project fizzled out, others replaced it. From Apple Music, to Instagram, to AirBnB and Amazon, every major digital project in the last 20 years has been built around content.
One form of content that’s especially relevant right now is user-generated visual content. Photographs, videos and graphics created by users make platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and AirBnB possible (and valuable) - and are a key source of online revenue.
Another form of content that’s booming is expressive microcontent. Emojis, GIFs, stickers and other visuals optimized for mobile devices, instant messengers and social apps are a multibillion dollar industry. The GIPHY service, now embedded into Facebook, Tinder, Slack and other services, is worth over $300 million on its own.
The intersection of these 2 trends — user-generated content and expressive microcontent — is personalized microcontent: GIFs, stickers, emojis made or customized by users and organizations.
Personalized microcontent is to regular microcontent what stock photos are to unique photos. It’s the more expressive, more effective, more targeted type of visual. And yet, most individuals and organizations are still using generic microcontent.
Why is that?
Why is it that, a decade after emojis and other microcontent types became popular, customizing them is still so far from mass adoption?
We’ll take a closer look in next posts. Stay tuned!
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