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The Interactive Image Revolution
INTRODUCTION
ThingLink is a unique and innovative young company that interlaces images and other content types in a new and powerful way. As part of our relationship with ThingLink, Pivot Conference has both worked with the ThingLink platform and analyzed its use by major publishers and brands. This report is a distillation of those explorations of ThingLink.
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THE VISUAL REVOLUTION
Today, for the first time in history, images are easy to create, perhaps even easier than words. The combination of network universality, social networking and the smart phone has unleashed images in a whole new way, producing new and dramatic effects for individuals and corporations alike.
And, perhaps even more importantly, the wall of permanence around images has been breached. Now images can be “sampled” like music and combined into new forms. They can be enhanced with powerful elements that weren’t in the frame when the shutter was snapped.
This is a new Visual Revolution with profound implications for the future. The mean size for content distribution overall is shrinking — once defined by pages, now by 140 characters — and the role of images in that distribution is rising. Pinterest has shown the power of a mosaic of visual choice. Instagram and Tumblr have become places where people expose their IDs through serial images, whether they recognize it or not. That is why the instantaneous and fast-fading nature of Snapchat works for the rising genera-tion; they are literally chatting through images, something once possible only with words. And all of this is only the beginning. The big breakthrough comes when the emerg-ing power of flexible, shareable images crosses the border into the realm of effective marketing and advertising.
ENTER: THINGLINK
ThingLink is a dramatic expression of the Visual Revolution.
In the past, images have been embedded into websites. By contrast, ThingLink em-beds the website into the image. Rather than simply being an embellishment, the image itself become the platform for launching videos, other images, slideshows, web links and any other form of content. The image becomes a concentrator of information, a porta-ble container for a whole layer cake of content. And, in so doing, ThingLink opens a vast range of new visualizations, ad approaches and laminated information delivery.
As Jordan Bitterman, Chief Strategy Officer at Mindshare has said: “[ThingLink] speaks to two macro trends in online advertising: brands acting as publishers and native advertising. Engaging with images is key to both … and the next obvious evolution is to make them come alive.”
Lewis D’Vorkin, Chief Product Officer at Forbes, echoes this sentiment about ThingLink. “In digital publishing, the tools will set you free. What they’ve done here is something really shrewd. They’ve turned the photo into a content discovery platform.”
Though what ThingLink does, embedding various kinds of content directly into im-ages, seems straightforward — and at the core it is — the range of possibilities the platform unlocks is truly startling.
Here are some varied examples:
Groupon is using ThingLink to produce visual, information-rich catalog web pages. Customers cannot only see the images of products they might like, they can access a sec-ond level of product data without leaving the page, or leaving the image for that matter. Visitors, instead of skipping past a visual page like stones on water, seeking deeper infor-mation, stay on the page, increasing engagement. And, as we’ll show later in this report, this deeper engagement leads to a significantly enhanced response.
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ENTER: THINGLINK
Cisco used ThingLink to transform an ad image into a revelation of the back story for a whole urban transportation technology initiative.
ENTER: THINGLINK
For Nokia, ThingLink was used to embed product information directly into the image of a new product within a website.
And IBM is using ThingLink to create layered infographics. The image itself is the primary infographic; then ThingLink unveils a deeper information level around key points.
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ENTER: THINGLINK
The storytelling power of ThingLink can be seen in its use by Bandit Lite, a lighting producer for events and concerts.
ThingLink has application in education, as well. This is how one educator used the platform to explicate the elements within her learning system.
ENTER: THINGLINK
And here is how BuzzFeed brought a travel piece to life. ThingLink was used to actually embed the movie trailers referenced by a map of London sites shown in major motion pictures.
These examples represent a small sliver of what will become possible when con-tent-flow inside images becomes more widely recognized and adopted.
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THE IMPACT OF THINGLINK ON RESPONSE
If ThingLink did nothing but delight those who experience it, the platform would be valuable. But early indications imply that embedding content into images has signif-icant impact on ad response.
“You get bigger, better ads that cut through clutter, more interaction and more an-alytics,” says Dave Morris, Chief Client Officer at CBS Interactive, about his experience with ThingLink.
To obtain a specific sense of ThingLink’s impact on ad fundamentals, Pivot and ThingLink worked together during the summer of 2013 to study ThingLink programs of companies across 4 core categories: Editorial Web, Editorial Social, Brand Web and Brand Social. In each case, actual, live ThingLink implementations were examined. In each category, 15 ThingLink enabled images were studied.
The results of the study, in the table below, show a dramatic impact for ThingLink images as response generators. At a time when banner ad click rates subsist between .01% and .04%, depending on source, ThingLink delivered an average click rate of be-tween 5.7% and 16%. Not only was the overall response rate breathtakingly high, the study indicated some clear reasons why.
One of the reasons ThingLink’s information-embedding approach has power is because it transforms an image from a single object, clickable or not, into a cornucopia of information choices. This produces an engagement intensification that neither stan-dard images nor content approaches can deliver. ThingLink content elements generate “hover” engagement at up to nearly 4X the level of views. This means a ThingLink image can generate 4 interactions from a single view. At the lowest level, ThingLink produces a 50% secondary engagement per view. Any one of these intensified interactions can be the trigger for a click. In short, the information-enabled image appears to be a more powerful tool for generating clicks than any other we have seen before.
Now, we should note that some of this pop could be the result of simple nov-elty. When banners first appeared, they have much higher rates of interaction than they do now, as have other new formats on first blush. But the very nature of
THE IMPACT OF THINGLINK ON RESPONSE
information-enhanced images tilts against the kind of user blindness and ennui that have developed around previous formats. ThingLink images offer choice, which is in-creasingly what consumers want. And, that choice can be tuned swiftly and inexpen-sively in myriad different ways. The enhanced image is fundamentally self-optimizing.
The ThingLink study shows clearly that the more information options in an image — shown on the table as # of Tags — the higher the engagement intensification. That doesn’t necessarily lead directly to higher click rates, but it certainly increases the po-tential for maximization.
Another view of ThingLink’s power can be seen by diving into the perfor-mance of Groupon’s program in the summer of 2013. Across six different products, ThingLink produced a remarkable click rate of 16% and an intensification of 96%, which means that nearly all of those who viewed the images saw the additional content that ThingLink delivered. In essence, that is a fundamental doubling of engagement; each user sees both the image itself and at least one additional piece of content on each view. We feel it is this essential intensification that drives ThingLink’s high response rates.
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HOW PIVOT USED THINGLINK
In addition to studying how others use ThingLink, Pivot itself used the platform to enhance promotion and information delivery for the Conference.
We addressed the challenge of bringing a star-studded preview video about Pivot to our home page without pushing other key content below the fold by embedded the video thumbnail into our home page header with ThingLink. Visitors could see the video and launch it directly from the page. We saw a 41% increase in new traffic to one of our external marketing programs after creating a Thinglink button to promote the program within Pivot’s web header.
We also used ThingLink to transform the images of Pivot’s speakers into infor-mation launch pads. In the past, you could see our speakers’ images all together but needed to click away to learn more about them. With ThingLink we were able to bring web pages, social connections, bios, videos and other speaker background right into the pictures. This created a three-dimensional experience we felt served the needs of our busy community of Social Business Leaders well. We saw an increase in the average time on the speaker section of Pivot’s website from 3:07 to 4:04. We received a gush of pleasure from Pivot’s generally hard to please speakers to this implementation, as many have asked to include additional content within their pictures on the site.
HOW PIVOT USED THINGLINK
InfoTrends provides a succinct summation of ThingLink’s unique place in the social marketspace: “Images are an important communication method. By making images in-teractive, they become more interesting, more user friendly, and ultimately more valu-able. For businesses and (in particular) publishers, ThingLink holds merit because it is an easy to use and easy to measure method for online engagement. Equally for consumers, ThingLink is interesting because of the additional layers of personally relevant informa-tion that can be added to images. Images as a platform for communicainforma-tion will become increasingly sophisticated as businesses and consumers search for ways to make their images more meaningful.”
We agree. Our team found ThingLink seamless to set up and nearly instantaneous to deploy. Based on our initial experience with the platform this year, we are actively exploring new and deeper ways to use ThingLink heading into 2014.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THINGLINK
Though young, ThingLink is already drawing attention from the market. The com-pany has received notable press coverage. If you want to learn more about ThingLink, here are some resources you can turn to:
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/discovery-taps-thin-glink-bring-more-interactivity-its-websites-152703 http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/05/28/thinglink-mobile/ http://mashable.com/2013/07/10/britney-spears-ooh-la-la-music-video-gifs/ http://mashable.com/2013/04/23/thinglink-facebook/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y8R1qXnS1AI
Of course, you could always go straight to the source to learn more about ThingLink.
You can find a fact sheet about ThingLink here: http://www.thinglinkpress.com/ fact-sheet/
A great summation of the company’s key values can be found here: http://www.thingLink.com/business
Or, simply reach out to: Neil Vineberg, CMO @nvineberg
