The content shock is a reality
Brands have been in an unleashed content race since the late 2000s. As forecasted by Mark Schaefer in his famous post; Content Shock[i], the production of content has increased 6 fold over the last decade. Willing to seize the new and exploding opportunities of contact on mobile, brands have allocated $50 billion[ii] of investments in visual content in 2019.
The “war for attention” in beauty
In a mobile centric world saturated with content, standing out is an extreme challenge for brands.
MIT Research, “in the blink of an eye”, says marketers only have 13 milliseconds to capture the attention of their audience.
The 1000+ beauty brands, analyzed by TheContillery, published on average 1,022 posts per year on Instagram in 2019 and 2020. The most prolific ones published almost 30,000 times.
With extremely high disparities in performance, best performing brands generate 5x more engagement than low performers, for a comparable number of followers.
What is the secret of these highly performing brands on engagement?
The drivers of engagement
On Instagram, social engagement - measured by the number of likes, shares and quality of comments – is mainly influenced by:
Collaboration with influencers, for content creation, showcasing product results or brand exposure
Animation strategies, with the use of relevant hashtags, the incentives to like, share or comment
Creative strategy and execution, coherent with the brand strategy while insuring visual content differentiation.
Based on our analysis, visual content is by far the main driver leading the engagement generated by a post.
Visual engagement is the corner stone of any social-engagement strategy on Instagram.
How to visually stand out from the crowd?
Computer-vision technology allows us to identify image attributes that are driving the performance of visuals
The new possibilities offered by Artificial Intelligence are changing conventional wisdom, which had assumed that creativity could not be modelized, evaluated or learned.
By enabling computers to gain in-depth understanding of creative contents, computer-vision technology allows us to identify image attributes that are driving the performance of visuals: Objects, colors, framing, scene, harmonies, sharpness, brightness, etc.
To illustrate this ground-breaking discovery, let’s consider an example with two images of lipstick application.
The image on the left (credit: Charlotte Tilbury) - is highly engaging due to the following characteristics: Close up on lips, teeth are visible, object opened with visible texture, overall color harmony.
In contrast, data shows that a wide shot and overall lack of color harmony, as in the second image, make it difficult to focus the audience’s attention on a particular point which is confused by too much color information.
Based on thousands of lipstick images, results demonstrate that on average the first category of images is 130% more engaging than the second category.
To discover other visual codes amongst the most engaging in beauty, download TheContillery research.
TheContillery has analyzed the engagement generated on Instagram by 1,000+ beauty brands in 85 countries
And see the key findings of this extensive research regarding visual engagement in beauty.
Choosing the right mix of images is the first step to developing a highly performing visual strategy
Selecting an engaging creative execution significantly differs from one product category to another
Customizing your visual strategy to the targeted audiences and regional specificities.
Entering the new era of Creative Intelligence
Up until recently, the new need for high frequency-content production had hardly been compatible with the search for creative excellence.
Historically an art, the key step to choosing the right mix of images associated with the proper execution has become a science. Computer vision and data science allow us to measure and understand perfectly which image categories are over performing.
By providing a clear understanding of what the art of visual engagement is, artificial intelligence opens the way to a new era of Creative Intelligence.