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Image Creation for the Modern Marketer
- 1. One Size Doesn't Fit All Image Creation and Management for the Modern Marketer
- 2. Who is this Travis Wright dude? • Radio Disc Jockey at Age 13. • Military Intelligence and Russian Linguist in the US Army. • Mediocre Stand-up Comic since 1995. • Web developer since 1996. • SEO & Creating Content since 1997. • Former Global Social Media Strategist – Norton / Symantec • Chief Marketing Technologist – CCP.Digital • Tech Journalist & Columnist MarketingLand, Inc., VentureBeat & others • Author of Book, Digital Sense, published by Wiley, Jan 2017 • Cofounder of Deep See, a deep learning & content aggregation startup
- 3. Who is this Robert Moseley dude? • Studied Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota (you betcha!) • Speaks English, Spanish, and Russian (ni mnoga pa ruski) • Professional Developer since 2006 • Agency (JWT), Large tech (Adobe), and Startup vet • Extremely amateur golfer • Ridiculously amateur guitar player • Ludicrously amateur bowler • Inventor of the CuddleCap • Weekend Backpacker/Camper
- 4. 65% Of the web is IMAGES
- 7. In 2009 4 resolutions accounted for >70% of all traffic (and they weren’t all that different)
- 8. In 2017 The top 4 resolutions accounted for <42% of all traffic (and they are totally different from each other!)
- 9. <img src=“insufficient” /> The Web is FLUID Bitmaps are FIXED VS
- 10. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ Every 1 second in additional page load time Decreases Conversion Rate by 7%
- 12. Twitter.com 1. Wrong size 2. Wrong format 3. Wrong quality settings 4. Not Responsive It’s not just you!
- 13. Twitter.com 1. Right size! 2. Right format! 3. Right quality settings! 4. Responsive! 5. 84.9% Smaller! *14.99kb vs 99.22kb It’s not just you!
- 14. What does Google have to say about this? Williams-Sonoma
- 15. “In some regions of the world, the bandwidth cost of delivering image ads exceeds the return." - Jai Krishnan- Product Manager for WebP at Google
- 16. Yeah yeah yeah, I get it. How is done, damnit?! Upload to the cloud Transform and adapt Deliver Globally https://res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/w_500,h_300,c_fill,g_auto/q_auto,f_auto/sample.jpg
- 18. Personalization = Right person + Right message
- 19. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma Default Experience: Gifts, New, Sale Category Affinity
- 20. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma Cutlery Category Affinity
- 21. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma Cutlery Experience: Knife Sets, Shun Cutlery, Sale Category Affinity
- 22. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma 148 products in “Cookware Sets” sub- category alone
- 24. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma This is actually 1 big image 3 Personalized areas on this image Let’s assume 1000 Products ~1000^3 potential versions 1 BILLION image variations to do product-level personalization
- 25. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma 1 Billion Images • Each takes 1 minute to create • It would take 1902 years and 7 months to manually create these images! • Alternatively you could hire 7992 Full Time Employees to get this done in 1 year (40 hours a week, no vacations or holidays because you’re a terrible person) • Each employee costs $50k in salary per year • It would cost $399.6 MILLION dollars to scale personalization to this level
- 26. Case Study: Williams-Sonoma Solution = Data Layer + Dynamic Media <-480px-> <-480px-><-50px-> <- Last Product image Last Product Name -> <a href=“/products/lastproductURL.html”> <img src=“//res.cloudinary.com/demo/q_auto,f_ auto/w_480,h_480,c_fill,g_auto/w_480,h_ 530,c_pad,g_north/l_text:arial_30:LastProd uctName/LastProductImage.jpg” /> </a>
- 27. Case Study: Image Quality vs Conversion Rate The Laffer Curve The Laughable Curve
- 28. Case Study: Image Quality vs Conversion Rate http://res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/q_auto:good/farmerbob.jpg
- 29. Case Study: Display Ad and Email Optimization <- The Image <- The Branding <- The Call to Action
- 30. Case Study: Display Ad and Email Optimization Saturation res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/ws-example.jpg res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/e_saturation:100/ws-example.jpg
- 31. Case Study: Display Ad and Email Optimization Contrast res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/ws-example.jpg res.cloudinary.com/demo-robert/e_contrast:60/ws-example.jpg
- 32. Case Study: Display Ad and Email Optimization Style Transfer + =
- 33. Case Study: Display Ad and Email Optimization Rotate, flip and alter image shapes Photo effects and filters Text overlays, watermarks and image overlays
- 34. And Marketers lived happily ever after… THE END
Editor's Notes
- Marketers use images to elicit an emotional response with their target audiences. Images are an effective way to get people’s attention and this has led to an explosion of creative content on the web. In fact 65% of the web today is images, most of this is directly related to marketing efforts. Think of your emails, display ads, social posts, landing pages, even your homepage. It’s all imagery!
- Images have almost tripled in total bandwidth in the last 6 years, and this has actually caused some problems as our connection speeds have not exactly kept pace.
- Images have almost tripled in total bandwidth in the last 6 years. In fact in 2015 the weight of images alone was 25% greater than that of the entire average webpage in 2012, and this has caused issues.
- In 2009, most traffic was from desktops with reliable connections and similar screen sizes. You could build one site and deliver one set of images and you’d be covered. These were the pre-responsive days and life was easy.
- Today, more and more internet traffic is from slower network-connected mobile devices. In fact mobile resolutions account for roughly half of all internet traffic. And on top of that, many people in rural areas simply don’t have access to broadband speeds at all.
- Webpages today are mostly fluid. They can adapt to the user’s device and orientation in a snap to provide a good experience no matter how it is viewed. Images on the other hand, are a bit more difficult. They remain these solid chunks in an otherwise free-flowing web. They are hard to adapt, and past a certain point, they are doing more harm than good.
- So just how important is this? Well, a delay of a single second will hit your bottom line to the tune of 7%. All that hard work you are putting into analytics, A/B Testing, segmentation, and personalization will be for naught if you do not do it efficiently. In addition, one of the most important factors in SEO ranking is the performance of your website, making performance a double whammy.
- A huge problem we are facing is that most marketing tools slow down the site, meaning we are starting with a handicap we must make up before can even start realizing ROI. In addition, marketers are not trained on web performance optimization (WPO) and things like selecting the right image/video format, compression setting, or even CDN delivery are an afterthought, starting us further and further behind in our optimization and personalization efforts. Would that personalization campaign have shown better results if we optimized the experience for page load time? Would that video hero test have won if we had delivered the video at the right resolution and codec? With such a well studied and thorough understanding of the relationship between page load and conversion, this should be more top of mind
- Don’t feel bad, it’s not just you! It’s a really hard problem to solve, as you can see even Twitter does not do it right! This image is the wrong size, the wrong format, the wrong quality settings, and is not responsive. Holy crap, could it be any worse?!? Yes, I’ve seen a lot worse, and we’ll see an example later when we talk about the other side of optimization. What does it look like if we do do it right though?
- This one image can be 85% smaller if adapted correctly. Multiply that by every image and you can quickly see how this adds up to a very poor user experience. Especially if your internet connection isn’t optimal.
- SEO stuff Page load speed has a huge impact on Search Engine page rank https://www.spyfu.com/seo/overview/domain?query=williams-sonoma.com Wiliams-Sonoma has over 60k keywords that are ranked outside of the 1st page (which nobody will see). They also rank 9/100 SEO image URLs ****head to Williams-Sonoma.com to show in real time an image compression, use techcrunch.com as a 2nd example
- This is an astounding fact. In some regions of the world like most of Africa, the middle east, and even India and Indonesia, the bandwidth costs of delivering an ad exceed the expected return. There are even less regions where video ads have a positive ROI, so what are we supposed to do? It’s becoming increasingly more expensive, resource intensive, and in this case, even impossible for marketers to do their jobs.
- Cloudinary optimizes the entire process, from easy upload to automatic image adjustments to Multi-CDN delivery. Upload to Cloudinary and we’ll provide you a URL for your asset. Simply add parameters to the URL to request the image at the size/quality/format/etc you need. Define what size, crop, focus, quality, and format you want (or whether you want Cloudinary to automatically determine the optimal settings) and Cloudinary will generate the image and deliver it globally through our multi-cdn layer. You can even control things like effects, filters, and control text and image overlays, all from the image URL. And this is what really opens the floodgates of possibilities for marketers.
- So far we’ve discussed the importance of Web Performance Optimization but there’s actually another form of optimization that images are gumming up the works of: Conversion Rate Optimization. Let’s take personalization for example…
- Personalization requires data about your visitors so you know who they are as well as a customized piece of content to show them that will be relevant. For instance, if you know your visitor is a 25 year old male, you will want to show them different content than you would a 75 year old woman. The data piece of this equation has been mostly solved and has been for some time now. There are dozens of DMPs, Optimization tools, and even Tag Management tools that all offer the ability to track and build actionable profiles of your visitors. The problem has always been on the content creation side. Content creation requires manual effort, i.e., a creative team member with Photoshop, to actually create the imagery. This creates a bottleneck where you are limited in what you can execute by the amount of creative content you can produce. While personalization remains a great idea, very few, if any organizations have successfully executed personalization at scale because of this Content Dilemma. If you remove that barrier, what is possible?
- Let’s take a real-world example of a decently executed personalization campaign on Williams-Sonoma. On the homepage if you scroll down you’ll see a section of the site called “Just for You”. What they do here is track which categories you’ve visited and give you a “Category Affinity” score. After you’ve clicked around and displayed an affinity for a particular category of products, this section updates to show you content relevant to your previous behavior. For example:
- I clicked my way into the cutlery category and landed on these Wusthof Gourmet Steak Knives. Williams-Sonoma tracked this so now when I head back to the homepage, this session or a future one, I get updated content:
- Awesome, now I get some relevant content! I was looking at knives and the know that, showing me relevant content. But wait, I was looking at Wusthof Gourmet Steak Knives. Not Shun Cutlery, and not Knife Sets. My interest is in STEAK knives, not just knives. So while this is more relevant, it’s not perfect. But why not?
- But why not? Let’s look at their product hierarchy. There are 11 categories of products. Each category has at least 20 sub-categories. Each Sub Category can have hundreds of products. So while Williams-Sonoma can manage the content creation for 11 categories, they don’t have the resources to do it for hundreds of sub-categories and surely not for 1000’s of products.
- It’s easy to visualize the amount of time it would to take to create 11 images for each category. Perhaps a few hours, a day maybe? What would it take for Williams-Sonoma to do true personalization at the product level?
- Let’s say Williams-Sonoma wanted to scale out this personalization campaign. Even at the just the category level they see a lift in RPV so getting even more relevant will lead to an even greater lift. They have this one image which switches depending on category affinity. This image has three “personalizable” areas meaning that there are about 1000^3 (actually 1000x999x998) or one billion different variations of this image if we personalize at the product level vs eleven images at the category level. No wonder they stick with the categories.
- What sorts of resources would you need to do this? To create the 1 billion images it would take you 1902 years and 7 months if you can create each image in one minute flat. This means you would have started in the year 114CE. The big news event in 114CE was Emperor Trajan defeating the Parthians and overrunning Armenia and northern Mesopotamia. Or you could hire 7992 employees and work them to the bone with no holidays or vacations. Pesky overtime laws limit you to a 40 hour work week unfortunately so this gets expensive. If each employee costs you $50k in salary per year, you are paying out $400 Million dollars just to accomplish this personalization campaign. You better be selling a lot more knives! In addition, this is what the Personalized section looks like now. But just a few months ago this is what it looked like. That’s an expensive redesign! Not to mention, how do you also support a responsive layout, adaptive image formats, add in new products that are released, and protect against future changes in brand standards or yet another redesign? You can’t!
- We already have the data, we can easily track the last Product Page the visitor viewed, the name of that Product, and URL of the main Product Image they viewed using any A/B testing tool, Tag Manager, or even a simple snippet of JavaScript directly included on the page. We then simply pass that information to Cloudinary to generate a completely dynamic image URL that will adapt the image to the user’s behavior. Let’s see how this is done First we build a template to get the size, crop, and white area for text with the Product Name. Now we have a framework which we can “paint” with the right information. Next we want to insert the correct image. We captured this when the visitor went to the product page. It is recommended we store this in a cookie as Cloudinary can directly read the values from cookies. Alternatively, you could use your A/B testing tool or Tag Manager to directly insert this value from the Data Layer. Then we want to make sure the value of the text is correct. Since Cloudinary can overlay text in any font, style, and position, all we have to do is style the text in the URL, then pass the value from information we captured when they visited that last Product Page. Finally we populate the value of the anchor to link to the Product Page itself. Now we have a scalable, dynamic image, which took about 5 minutes to build, not 1902 years, and will adapt on its own for each visitor based on their behavior. This is just one example, and we’ll look at a few more, but you’re really only limited by your creativity. Scaling creative is no longer a bottleneck. Additionally, the image is optimized for quality and format and delivered through global CDN automatically so this is all occurring with optimal performance as well. **exit to williams-sonoma.com to show how this is done
- In the left graph, we see a graphical representation of the economics principle, “The Laffer Curve,” which illustrates how increases in government tax rates beyond a certain level will ultimately decrease tax revenue. While completely irrelevant to any government policy, there is actually a web-performance equivalent which you must pay attention to, The Laughable Curve. The Laughable Curve on the right shows the relationship between image quality/file size and revenue/conversion rate/engagement. The higher the quality of the image, the larger the file size and slower the site loads. There is an optimal balance between quality/file size and page load speed which results in the optimal balance. Any quality below this value and your site starts to look “Laughable” and it starts to harm revenue/conversion rate/engagement.
- We’re actually in the extremely unique position here of performing a test that starts with a well-studied, factual relationship instead of a hypothesis. We’re essentially guaranteed to see results. If this is the case, why in the heck has nobody ever tested this before? The same Content Dilemma that prevents Williams-Sonoma from scaling their behavioral personalization campaign to it’s logical completion. It just simply takes too much work to create all the content and host/deliver it. And what happens if you find that some segments prefer low quality images and a fast loading site, and others prefer high quality images because they have the bandwidth for it? How do you scale that going forward indefinitely? With Cloudinary it’s a simple as adding the quality setting you want the image in right to the URL.
- Ads and emails are essentially just marketing images. The goal is to get people to click through to get to your site. The ad or email must be relevant to the user, this requires data about the user, and this part is mostly solved with DMPs and DSPs. The second part is a bit more tricky. We must also capture the user’s attention and ensure the content is actually relevant. The ads appear in a sea of other content, most of which the user actually chose to see, and for this reason ads have a ridiculously low clickthrough rate of around .05%. Even a slight increase in this clickthrough rate though, can lead to large returns on investment. So what can we do here? Ad typically consist of three parts. The background image, the branding, and the call to action. As we saw in the previous Williams-Sonoma example, we can easily control the content of the image, the text, image, and branding position, copy, etc, so we can scale out to a previously impossible level in that regard. Yet another thing we can do in addition is also manipulate how the image looks to better captures the user’s attention. We can do this with image effects!
- It’s easy to adjust things like saturation to bring out the colors of an image
- Or contrast
- Or even chain different effects together. You can even transer the style of one image onto another! Let’s make this an an impressionist piece of art to appeal to the sophisticated side of our ad viewers (sarcasm)
- And there are scores of other effects you can test and try out to find that optimal image! This is just a small sample
- Now you can see how important images are and what is possible with a dynamic imaging service. Not only can you adapt to deliver the optimal quality, format, and sized image, you can also ingest data and deliver the optimal personalized and tested assets!