Recently I posted about global digital camera shipments out of Japan decreasing by 40%+ – 48% when it comes to entry level cameras.
The reason is of course the increased use of smartphones as people’s main cameras.
More evidence that this is so comes from ABI Research, which says that by 2018, 2.7 billion mobile cameras are due to ship, 80% of those being in smartphones.
So what does that mean for anyone involved in consumer marketing, advertising and social media:
1 – It’s the whole subject matter of this blog: There is a fundamental shift in consumers expressing themselves visually with photo-sharing being elevated to twitter style broadcasting via social networks such as Instagram (and indeed Twitter itself)
2 – Visual social media is becoming more fragmented with different networks catering for different niches. While Instagram towers over the photo-sharing space, there is also room for services which promote themselves on the quality of their content, such as EyeEm and Tadaa, or are about story telling such as Backspaces.
3 – At the same time it’s becoming more mainstream with social media giants integrating it into their services.
Exhibit A, Facebook trying to unsuccessfully copy visual messaging service snapchat via its own Poke app.
Exhibit B, Twitter working with Aviary to integrate Instagram style filters into its service
Exhibit C, Google buying photo editing app snapseed and integrating it more into Google+
Exhibit D, Yahoo! boss Marissa Meyer making Flickr a top priority and launching a completely revamped iOS app
Simply put if you are rolling out a marketing campaign, there now needs to be some kind of photo and / or video element in it.
Think your company isn’t visual and this is only for the fashion, entertainment or travel industries?
Think again – Instagram is a repository for images about absolutely everything. 100k+ images are currently tagged ‘powerlines’, 38k are tagged ‘doorporn’, while 109k even involved people taking pictures of tractors.
(With thanks to fellow Rabbit Zoe for letting me know about the stat from ABI Research. Be sure to check out her post and blog as well)
(Above ‘powerline porn’ image from @vandalsquad420k)
