SAN JOSE, Calif. (August 4, 2015)—A picture may be worth a thousand words, but marketers have not turned a strategic lens on optimizing the return from their visual media content investments.  While 65 percent of senior marketing executives believe visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated, a scant 27 percent have the ability to aggregate, organize and manage these assets across marketing and non-marketing teams—including those outside of the organization.

A new study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council—entitled “From Content to Creativity: The Role of Visual Media in Impactful Brand Storytelling”—reveals that marketers believe visual assets, including photography, illustrations, infographics and videos, are core to customer engagement and will increase in usage in the coming year. Video will most dramatically increase in importance in the near future, according to 79 percent of senior marketers. Infographics (60 percent), photographs (50 percent), and illustrations (41 percent) will also increase in usage. The 17-page strategic white paper is available for download today.

Conducted in partnership with Libris, a PhotoShelter business unit, the study reveals that internal silos, disconnected content development strategies and a vast list of other marketing priorities have prevented visual assets from being fully leveraged across the organization.

“Marketers have been remiss in approaching the visual asset dialogue as part of the strategic customer experience and engagement dialogue,” said Liz Miller, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the CMO Council. “Perhaps because visual assets have long been the domain of creative or agency resources, the conversation around maximizing value across the organization has fallen off of the priority list. But as customers continue to react in meaningful ways to visual media, marketing cannot afford to stand idly by and not include visuals in the content ROI agenda.”

Consumer research shows that 40 percent of customers will respond better to visual information than plain text (Zabisco). Marketers have, in turn, shifted content production to include vast quantities of graphics, videos, photography and illustrations. Infographic production, by one estimate, increases by 1 percent every day (Zabisco). Yet according to the 177 marketing executives surveyed by the CMO Council in the second quarter of 2015, current investments in centralization of these assets do not reflect this level of priority.

“Companies will continue making massive investments in the production and procurement of visual media assets because of the obvious and powerful impact on audience engagement and customer experience,” explained Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter. “Yet as the study shows, hiding these assets away in team silos is destroying the greater organization’s potential return on content investments. As more content is captured and created, companies will need to rebalance their focus with a greater emphasis on strategies behind digital asset management, including centralization, storage and accessibility.”

The audit, conducted through the CMO Council’s Content ROI Center, tapped into the insights of 177 senior marketers, with 52 percent from B2B organizations, 18 percent from B2C companies and 30 percent from hybrid organizations selling to B2B2C. A quarter of respondents hail from organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and 41 percent hold chief marketing officer, head of marketing or senior vice president of marketing titles. Areas explored in the paper include:

• The role of visual media in marketing and brand storytelling strategies


• Anticipated shifts in the importance of visual media


• Budget allocations and anticipated shifts in spend for visual media development


• Key challenges and obstacles to maximizing ROI


• Impact and value of visual media aggregation and consolidation

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is the only global network of executives specifically dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide range of global industries. The CMO Council's 9,000 members control more than $450 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include more than 35,000 global executives in more than 110 countries covering multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, India and Africa. The council's strategic interest groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE), Mobile Relationship Marketing (MRM) Strategies Forum, LoyaltyLeaders.org, CMOCIOAlign.org, Marketing Supply Chain Institute, Customer Experience Board, Digital Marketing Performance Institute, GeoBranding Center and the Brand Inspiration Center. Learn more at www.cmocouncil.org.

About Libris

Libris enables organizations to tell their visual stories, offering the simplest visual asset management solution available. With 10 years in the cloud and more than 250 million assets managed, our cutting-edge software helps hundreds of top universities, pro sports teams, travel brands and organizations of all sizes easily organize, collaborate on and share their photos and videos. It’s a powerful media library that will centralize your team’s assets and change the way you communicate visually. Libris is a business unit of PhotoShelter and is based in New York, NY. For more information please visit http://libris.photoshelter.com/.