In the Internet age, the century old phrase “one picture is worth a thousand words” can easily be redesigned to something like… “A collection of pictures is worth billions of dollars in audience engagement.” According to an article  published in November’s issue of “Fast Company” Magazine, of 50 tech startups evaluated at over $1 billion in the last decade at least nine are actually photography companies – e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, Pinterest, Airbnb, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Tumblr.

Although we may think of these companies as either social communities, news and messaging services, or online storage and accommodation providers, the article draws on the insight that all of these startups are in the business of processing our photos and are redesigning the photo economy as we knew it in the age of Polaroid or Kodak. Photo posts are social media’s biggest driver of audience engagement and advertising and our desire to share our snapshots with the world is changing the face of Internet marketing, with more and more brands realizing the huge potential of the Visual Web. How will this trend change the way we, as consumers, interact with brands? What online strategies will marketers approach to keep brands involved in this visual user generated content?

Consumers are looking more and more to learn about brands not from the companies themselves, but rather from other users or authority figures. These online communities where people post, share, judge and even create products, situations, ideas and industries using not the power of text, but that of images – as the article points out, according to an analysis done by marketing company Hubspot, photos posted on Facebook generated 104% more comments than text posts – allow brands to create engagement and advertise without even using ads.

Take the example of Taco Bell, a company that ran a four week campaign through Instagram ad buy and increased by 45% its users base by posting images of customers enjoying waffle tacos. An important takeaway here is that by participating in what people are doing and by creating content they want to share and recreate themselves – Taco Bell “It’s your birthday!” photograph – marketers create engagement and value without advertising.

Another important point the article makes is the huge storytelling potential photography holds, which in the digital marketing sphere is still in its early stages. This makes me think of the important switch advertising is making towards storytelling, where instead of simply presenting consumers the benefits or characteristics of products, marketers are allowing consumers to create their own stories around the brands or simply the values that they stand for – see the example of the P&G “Thank You Mum” campaign for the Olympics. For this reason it is my belief that apps like Storehouse  – mentioned in the article – hold huge potential to change the face of digital marketing campaigns and engagement with online audiences. In this crowded photo economy, Storehouse allows users to create and share compelling video essays and tell stories with their photographs. Soon, this could revolutionize the user as creator of customized content concept and instead of having to create their own digital campaigns or vlogs, marketers will just have to handle the challenge of curating the content they release on the Visual Web – as the article mentions, brands are seeing 50-70% increase in Instagram likes days after posting one ad, meaning that people go looking for more content. The opportunity I see here is for brands to create high quality content and consistently communicate the values they abide by – so that people will want to integrate both into the stories they create and share on the Web.

One final important trend the article mentions, in my view keeping with the same line of storytelling, is the rise of shoppable photos, seen as “the holy grail of Internet marketing”. Are shoppable photos the next level in creating unique customer experiences and driving consumer engagement? Judging by the number of tech startups trying to build platforms that turn our images into online catalogues – one of them being the company Luminate acquired in September by Yahoo – and maybe coupling this with the recent partnership signed between Instagram and the marketing Giant Omnicom Group, I would say this is definitely one trend to look out for in the future. If I think only of challenges presented by using celebrity images and turning them into stores – the article mentions one example of a lawsuit from actress Katherine Heigl – such open o paid for platforms to transform any photograph into an interactive store could become the new way to storytell brands as part of the lives of normal people. Just think… An average of 60 million photos posted daily on Instagram, plus some 700 million images couriered every day through WhatsApp, equals as many opportunities to create visual, online stories around brands. Considering that online audiences are becoming more and more critical and selective of the content they wish to see and share, all these trends make me hopeful that we, as inhabitants of the Visual Web, are in for more high quality, unique creative content in the future.

Reference: “The Photo Economy” by Sarah Kessler, http://www.fastcompany.com/3036082/the-photo-economy