Looking Ahead: Brands, Creativity And Visual Identity In 2019

The world of content creation is robust and complex, with enough particularities to make your head spin.

Despite this, understanding visual branding is a crucial part of making a brand stand out.

Those who fail to capitalise on this fail to be seen, quite literally, and even the most promising product or campaign can be passed over if it blends into the background.

This is particularly true in the modern era, where the shift has been made from text-based advertising to a more visual standard, and it falls very much in line with trends in social media usage.

One need only look at the meteoric rise of Instagram for confirmation of this: if it doesn’t pop, they won’t shop.

Despite the mounting amount of pressure on brands to understand and successfully implement this concept, there is also a demand for immediacy, placing the impetus on marketers to educate themselves on the nuances.

Shutterstock Custom’s senior vice president Grant Munro understood the growing significance of content, customisation and localisation — and took action.

Munro launched his start-up and quickly grew it from zero into a US$55 million business in three-and-a-half years.

Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Shutterstock, the need for the business continues to explode.

B&T‘s latest white paper in partnership with Shutterstock, ‘Looking ahead: Brands, Creativity and Visual Identity in 2019’, gives insight into the knowledge that Munro and other industry leaders have obtained, explaining it in simple, tangible terms.

On the shift from text-based to visual advertising, the white paper observes:

The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. And it’s more accustomed to processing images – ninety per cent of the information sent to the brain is visual, and 93 per cent of all human communication is visual.

There’s also the matter of scale to consider, a conceptually straightforward process that can cause incredible hardship when actually put into practice.

Munro spoke last October at a B&T Breakfast Club event on the headaches he faced initially.

“There was a lot of blood sweat and tears trying to figure out how to do this,” Munro said, “There’s this notion of upfront calibration. When you’re working for a brand, the concept of brand look and feel if you’re not in that world is somewhat abstract”.

Abstract is perhaps an understatement to the layperson; suitable synonyms could include daunting or unfathomable.

Leading industry minds help to put the pieces together, with speakers including Yellow NZ’s Bruce Pilbrow, and Shane Evans of ABS, who has been with ABS for more than seven years and in the last three years Auckland Savings Bank Marketing has won over 50 NZ and global awards.

Their insights are consolidated by Leo Burnett’s Jess Lilley, Cummins&Partners’ Trent Hendrick, Intrepid Group’s Leigh Barnes and a host of others.

The white paper informs on topics such as:

Why visual branding is important
How to identify your brand’s personality
How to create customised content at scale
Upcoming trends for 2019 that you can use to boost your brand’s visibility

Perhaps Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos puts it best when he says: “Branding is what people say about you when you are not in the room”.

It’s time to make them talk, and to ensure that they don’t stop talking.

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