Taking a Forest View at Visual Storytelling

The other day I had this mental exercise that made me think hard about the implications for visual storytellers looking at our changing landscape.

Obviously, no one knows for sure, but here’s my take.

First, let’s look at the numbers

Even before dreaming of going live, 60-70 percent of content produced by B2B companies goes unused due to irrelevancy (SiriusDecisions).

The average person today sees 4,000-10,000 ads a day compared to 500-1,600 back in the ‘70s (Forbes).

Of which 53 percent of ads goes unseen (IAS Media Quality).

Organic social reach on all platforms has decreased. Facebook, the most used is now down to 0.07 percent (Forbes). That means, 99.93 percent of the time no one sees your post!

Add to that 90.63 percent of pages get no organic search traffic from Google (Ahrefs).

What this tells you is that the majority of published content is pretty much on the same level of never existed, losing the battle to fierce gatekeepers - paid and organic algorithms.

The elephant in the room

All of these stats paint a very clear picture; the elephant in the room is of course the challenge of overcoming the growing communication noise.

A staggering information overload (global data to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025), coupled with quite an elusive attention span (2.5 minutes in 2004 down to 47 seconds in 2023).

So, right off the bat, we have a problem of getting your stories seen even before you can dream of making a first impression.

Add to that the 20+ year old social media sector is reaching a fatigue point, deepfakes, disinformation and cybersecurity threats - are all on the rise.

The wildcard

And to give the story another twist.

Now AI is about to reshuffle things even more.

At this point, I liken AI to this wild unregulated Bronco we’re still learning how to tame for the right use cases...

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