Cloudinary Blog

The digital economy is driven by highly visual experiences. After all, viewers process images 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, it’s no surprise that top-notch visual media has been an essential component of a captivating e-commerce experience for years. Nor is it surprising that visual media’s importance only rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, a reality for all retailers, including our client Levi’s.

I think we can all agree images and videos, ubiquitous on today’s websites and mobile apps, are a core component of our digital life. They are no longer just important elements of the visual web story; they are that story. Equally crucial are interactive experiences, such as social discovery, 3D modeling, live shoppable videos, and even artificial or virtual reality.

As online interactions multiply exponentially, visual media has become the most significant venue for delivering the benefits of what used to be in-person contacts. With this in mind, companies have completely shifted their digital strategies for consumer experiences, taking a media-first approach in how they interact and engage.

Did you know that five billion users of the top five social apps post 41.6 million messages a minute? Or that three billion JPEG images are created every day?

Not only does this tremendous volume of peer-to-peer activity profoundly affect our social lives, it has also revolutionized the way shoppers navigate the purchase journey. How? By reading unbranded feedback and the like from other users, shoppers can avoid marketing hype and make purchase decisions based on what they often consider to be objective, honest opinions on the merchandise.

However, along with the benefits of user-generated content (UGC), comes myriad technical challenges. Content must be moderated to avoid compromising your brand. You need to provide a user-friendly process to efficiently manage content uploads. You need to transform images and videos to ensure brand consistency and web performance. You also need to ensure they look presentable across all devices and browser environments. To help brands address these issues and more, we recently ran a three-part blog series on UGC.

How we browse online in our quest of information has largely been an unknown factor since the Internet became ubiquitous in the mid-1990s. What’s indisputable is that we’re unlikely to type in URLs as a start, especially if we don’t have clues as to which site to visit. Google search revolutionized the ability to find relevant information through keyword entries, leading to the emergence of search-engine optimization (SEO), whereby you as site owners ensure that the popular keywords appear in your content.