Marketers need to upskill their visual literacy to stay competitive

The internet is becoming increasingly visual with each new generation. Images and videos dominate communication, especially among young people. Nothing has accelerated the already rapid growth of this visual content more than the pandemic. In this increasingly visual economy, marketers need visual literacy to keep up with developments.

Visual competence is a must

Many marketers are quite eloquent in their communications. They know how to write and edit persuasive texts. Most are adept at optimizing written content for SEO and measuring its effectiveness. Visual content, such as photos and videos, is great for conveying emotion and complex messages in a relatively small space, but they also come with their own set of challenges, because the devil is in the details. For example, how do you optimize images and videos so that they appear consistently across different browsers, devices, and formats? How do you ensure that the video is displayed correctly when a user turns the phone to landscape? How to optimize visual content for SEO? Fortunately, modern technology can help with such visual literacy issues and automate many of these processes. Despite all the technology, marketers should acquire a certain basic knowledge of visual media and be familiar with new image and video formats, for example.

Acquire knowledge about new formats

Whether for broadcast-quality live streaming, on-demand viewing, or real-time interactive communication, video is becoming increasingly important online, and marketers should seek to leverage these benefits efficiently.

On the technical side, a good starting point is the introduction of the AV1 video format. Unlike its HEVC and H.264 predecessors, AV1 was built for the modern web and is supported by big tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Netflix. Not only is AV1 royalty-free, but it also offers exceptional visual quality at a much lower bitrate. For brands...