Image Production: New Challenges to Boost Creativity and Productivity

In my pre­vi­ous arti­cle about tourism and dig­i­tal, I not­ed the impor­tance of images, and that 79 per­cent of Inter­net users claim that beau­ti­ful pic­tures encour­age them to browse longer.

Images nowa­days are of cru­cial impor­tance. We con­stant­ly tell brands that to be suc­cess­ful, they need con­tent, that con­tent encour­ages inter­ac­tions. We know it, con­tent is part­ly what we come for and what makes us want to come back. And images, as an inte­gral part of this glob­al con­tent, are essential.

But once this has been said, there is a dou­ble chal­lenge: on one hand are the cre­ativ­i­ty and the attrac­tive­ness of these images, and on the oth­er hand is their pro­duc­tion, which can be very cost­ly. The good news is that it is now pos­si­ble to man­age these issues much more eas­i­ly, while boost­ing over­all productivity.

The chal­lenge of image pro­duc­tion: The cre­ativ­i­ty aspect

Hyatt has a bank of 70,000 images, which feeds the hotel chain’s inter­ac­tions and plat­forms to encour­age peo­ple to vis­it its site and social networks.

Vente-Privée pro­duces 20,000 images each day. Pro­duc­tion is done inter­nal­ly, via a stu­dio of 900 peo­ple. The site is more than any­thing a cat­a­log, and Vente-Privée believes it needs the most beau­ti­ful images to enhance its brand and prod­ucts, in order to con­vince its customers—us.

For both com­pa­nies, the cost of pro­duc­ing con­tent is there­fore a major chal­lenge. Cer­tain con­tent spe­cif­ic to each brand must of course be pro­duced in-house; it can­not be gener­ic. How­ev­er, at the same time, there is also gener­ic, non-brand-spe­cif­ic con­tent that could be shared or used, par­tial­ly or com­plete­ly, by sev­er­al brands: a video clip of a scene in Paris, a pic­ture of a land­scape or a mon­u­ment , a “clas­si­cal” life sit­u­a­tion, and so on.

When we think of gener­ic con­tent, we all think of the rather basic stock images from large image banks. How­ev­er, pro­duc­tion, per­for­mance, qual­i­ty, and cre­ativ­i­ty are at play when we look for images pro­duced by oth­ers to use them on our sites. The reuse of images has a much low­er cost, allow­ing mon­u­men­tal gains of time and there­fore money.

At the same time, brands may need a cre­ative, orig­i­nal image. Image banks typ­i­cal­ly con­tain tens of mil­lions of images, so it’s gen­er­al­ly pos­si­ble to find what you’re look­ing for there.

The chal­lenge of pro­duc­ing images: The pro­duc­tiv­i­ty aspect

Beyond the cre­ativ­i­ty aspect, image pro­duc­tion is also cru­cial in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The evo­lu­tion of the tools allows sig­nif­i­cant tech­no­log­i­cal advances, dras­ti­cal­ly reduc­ing the time spent edit­ing the images. Today, we can total­ly inte­grate the image stream with the con­tent stream. It is thus pos­si­ble to use a stan­dard high-def­i­n­i­tion image cho­sen on a stock site to auto­mat­i­cal­ly replace all images with water­mark in low definition.

The automa­tion of image enhance­ment saves a lot of mon­ey. The Pfeif­fer report ded­i­cat­ed to Adobe Stock shows that it’s pos­si­ble to mul­ti­ply its pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 10! Indeed, the process of licens­ing and inte­gra­tion of an image can take only 16 sec­onds using the tool, against more than 3 min­utes before.

These phe­nom­e­nal pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains make for tremen­dous sav­ings. If we take the exam­ple of a com­mu­ni­ca­tion group with 10,000 cre­atives work­ing on images, mul­ti­ply­ing their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 10 rep­re­sents mil­lions of euros saved each year.

In con­clu­sion, images rep­re­sent both a chal­lenge for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and dis­tinc­tion for a brand, but also a real issue of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, via tools that allow for sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings, but which are often not well known.

What is your view on the impact of images with­in a com­pa­ny? Do not hes­i­tate to share your opin­ion with­in the comments!