By Juli Greenwood, head of global communications & customer marketing at Cloudinary
2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Disney Studios, the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros., and 60 years since the first episode of Doctor Who aired on the BBC. As we reflect on the art and history of storytelling, what stories created today will be shared and remembered 100 years from now? And what does it mean for online retailing?
In many ways it’s never been easier to create and share stories. We have the tools, technologies and infrastructures to reach audiences and consumers with dynamic digital stories all over the world. In other ways, it can feel like too much of a good thing, more media, devices, channels, and touchpoints – this is challenging brands beyond measure.
Digital media leaders are pulling out all the stops to overcome these challenges and make online shopping as smooth and attractive as possible. As the TikTok generation gains more buying power, brands use visual media in new and creative ways to tell compelling stories about value, quality, diversity, and sustainability in their product ‘stories.’ I expect this to drive a lot more campaigns and targeted promotions to spur on visual media growth.
Achieving revenue uplift and sustainability
Gartner predicts that by 2025, organisations offering a unified commerce experience by frictionlessly moving customers through journeys will see at least a 20% uplift in total revenue. We see this reflected in our customer base so I expect digital transformation efforts to continue ploughing ahead, because of, rather than despite economic challenges.
In the future, online retailers will use visual storytelling more to attract customers and build loyalty to get that 20% uplift. At the same time, CIOs, CMOs, and CDOs will be looking to achieve this lift as efficiently as possible. A huge piece of low-hanging fruit here is optimising the way engaging images and video are displayed on our screens.
That also means reducing visual media’s footprint will become a key part of IT strategy going forward. Slashing image file storage and traffic costs by pivoting to more lightweight image and video codec formats is an easy choice: it aligns with wider sustainability gains while improving site visitors’ experiences by promoting faster load times.
The role of AI automation
Getting lean and mean with image formats is just one way to make ecommerce a profit centre and help support the business in tougher times. For retail brands that haven’t yet tapped into the power of AI automation to improve overall efficiency, this year has to be about changing that. Retail will adopt automation to carry out as many repetitive tasks as it can. And as we’ve established, publishing visual media at an epic scale won’t work if there are bottlenecks working with digital media.
This year we’ll also see automation empowering campaign teams to do better work faster and deliver the superb image and content the market demands. This will also help address the chronic shortages of digital talent. AI will increasingly handle low-level, repetitive tasks so human colleagues can focus on the creative, value-add work they signed up for.
Transforming architecture to cope with change
Retail brands will also continue to transform their IT architecture issues to better cope with continually changing business conditions, consumer behaviours, and technology developments. The best way we’ve seen for companies to build cost-effective, nimble e-commerce systems that are easier to maintain and slot functionality in and out of is composable (think MACH, microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and Headless). Again, Gartner agrees, predicting that prices for B2C digital commerce platforms will be 30% less this year than in 2019, due to feature commoditisation and “headless” implementations, and that by 2024, the IT costs of managing SaaS operations will go down by half from widespread use of composable.
MACH might also be the best way to deal with another unpredictable part of your life this year: social media. Will Twitter survive? Will TikTok peak? Will new privacy regulations slow down growth?
A lesson from TV history might help here. Not that long ago we had just three TV channels, and everyone sat down to watch the same thing as it aired. To say that’s changed is an understatement, but it does give us a precedent for how social media will change and fragment in the same way the television experience has—and so anyone selling to the public must be flexible to adapt to these changes. Again, a fully-optimised image process allied to smart automation and a flexible back-end architecture is the best way to adapt to whatever global and local UK events throw your way.
I think we’re all glad to see classic platforms reach their centennial birthdays, and that we don’t just have three channels anymore. 2023 could be a better ecommerce year than we expect if brands make the most of new tools, strategies, and skills in our increasingly visual economy.
