As brands pursue audiences online, they are producing more creative content than ever — particularly around Instagram.

In the past twelve months, Brandfolder‘s Brand Index (check out the full Brand Index Report at the end of this article) tracked an 80% increase in videos and other creative material targeted for the platform.

With the Instagram community being a highly engaged group, brands rely on rich, visual content to connect to them. With the proliferation of new Instagram features, like video, Stories, multi-photo carousels, and IGTV, each subset requires its own content, further inflating the need for more brand creative.

The growth in brand creative isn’t just due to audience demands, however. The shelf life of brand assets has fallen as more brands compete with other content (and each other) for user attention.

In 2016-2017, the average asset shelf life was 395 days. From 2017-2018, it was 280 days, with varying lifespans across file type and industry. That’s a 29% decrease in lifespan. Over the next few years, we predict this number will continue to decrease.

Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.

Which means, as brands are becoming increasingly dynamic and getting serious about personalization, the need for brand creative, more frequently, will continue to skyrocket in order to stay current and relevant.

To bring this to life, think about the last professional sports game you watched. You noticed one team on the field was wearing a throwback jersey with an old school logo. At a different game, they were back to wearing their normal jerseys with the most current logo.

Later in the season, however, the team is wearing pink jerseys for Breast Cancer awareness. This is a prime example of a dynamic brand expressing their creativity while adapting to varying circumstances, events, and audiences. All of this necessitates fluid brand creative.

But what exactly is brand creative? In the broadest sense, it refers to the all-encompassing collection of online and offline creative assets that a business uses to represent its brand. When we refer to brand creative, we refer to assets of all types–like videos, social media posts, product photography, lifestyle imagery, sales materials, logos, fonts, 3d renderings, and much more.

At Brandfolder, we are focused on delivering intelligence about our customer’s brand creative. We house and manage millions of creative assets from companies of all sizes–anyone from small-scale mom-and-pop shops to large-scale Fortune 10 companies.

And within this massive creative data set, our data science team extracts actionable insights through asset scoring algorithms, prediction formulas, collections, classification tools, and uniqueness analysis, to name a few.

Through these analyses mentioned above, our data science team created the Brand Index– a collection of high-level brand creative trends that CMOs, brand managers, agency professionals, and designers should use to guide their strategic campaigns and deliverables. It was built on discoveries from tens of thousands of creative assets stored in our digital asset management platform from more than 6,000 brands between 2016-2019.

Some brands house asset counts as low as 60, while others house as many as 38,000 assets or more. Specific information analyzed within the Brand Index includes amounts of assets, file formats, asset orientation, asset shelf life, event-based interactions with assets, and more. This information was then combined with the customer’s industry and anonymized to remove any identifying and brand-specific information.

In the Brand Index, companies can learn things like why and how brands’ digital footprints are growing exponentially. From 2017-2018, total asset count on a by-brand basis skyrocketed by 81%. And, it’s on track to continue climbing.

Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.

A major factor for this digital asset boom could be the increasing demand for rich and personalized media on multiple channels, putting an even greater emphasis on the need for a robust digital asset management platform.

Additionally, as CMOs and design directors are putting more time and effort into their brand creative, the need for understanding which assets perform better, when and where, will continue to rise. Brands are already taking advantage of optimizing their creative content based on rich insights.

Thus, by integrating testing data with a platform that provides asset-specific performance insights, brands will have the competitive edge they need to continue retaining and building equity in the minds of their consumers.

Our findings also show that companies should take note of the shift in file type and how brand creative needs to become increasingly dynamic in order to keep delighting their customers. Rich media files used for engaging and dynamic advertising are on the rise–with video being a key player.

Videos have become the go-to file format supporting a variety of marketing and business goals like sales, retention, upsell opportunities, customer experience, education, thought leadership, and more. JPGs still tend to be a brand favorite, however, gone are the days that these JPGs only live in one place. Asset versatility and responsiveness are critical for the increase of digital channels. Which leads me to my next point: brand identity.

Most brands now have at least four logo orientation and color variations that contribute to consistency and cohesion across their growing portfolio of channels. The brands that are succeeding in the marketplace have animated logos and other engaging asset types that they can switch out on any channel with the snap of a finger.

And as mentioned earlier, if the average shelf life of an asset differs by file type with a current average being 280 days or less, which file formats should brands continue to invest in order to maximize their ROI?

But, what does asset shelf life really mean? Asset shelf life is defined as the number of days between when an asset was created and its latest event date (the last time it was accessed, viewed, downloaded, distributed, etc.). An asset is just like a living, breathing creature. It moves from creation through purpose and finally reaches retirement or its, sometimes timely, archival.

Not all assets are created equal, however. With the creation of AI & ML technologies, brands are getting smarter about their content’s performance. High-performing brands are quicker to remove underperforming content from their arsenal and generate new brand creative to keep things fresh.

And with video on the rise, that also takes a big chunk of change out of marketing and creative budgets. Thankfully, but not ironically, we’re seeing that the asset types that take a larger investment also have longer shelf lives.

Companies should invest in a management solution for more expensive assets to ensure they are generating the maximum reach and profitability throughout their lives.

As brands look to scale their identities and creative asset production, as well as their distribution and delivery strategies, companies should take advantage of the Brandfolder Brand Index in order to ensure they aren’t left behind with the constantly evolving landscape.

Read the full Brandfolder Brand Index below:

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Videos lead brand creative growth with 3x increase since 2017

A $30-per-month email service capturing the adoration of investors and founders in Silicon Valley is perhaps an unsurprising story in a subscription-obsessed landscape, yet we’re only now hearing how stealth-y startup Superhuman has captured investor $$$.

The New York Times reports that the SF startup closed a $33 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz last month, raising at a $260 million valuation. The company has been oddly tight-lipped about its funding for a startup that people won’t stop talking about, though CEO Rahul Vohra has justified this as a desire to keep the story on the product not the money.

Superhuman has little need for a marketing budget when every VC’s twitter is spreading the gospel of luxury email.

The startup has seemed to have grown at its own pace, the service’s members frequently reference the 100,000+ people on the waiting list to pay for the email app  though the company seems most intent on growing by word of mouth referrals which allow you to hop the line. (Roose’s story details that list is actually 180k people long, and that the company has less than 15k on-boarded subscribers)

The service is designed around helping people that spend several hours in email every day to find areas to cut down on friction. What’s it like though?

I spent about 6 months paying for the service (thanks for the referral Niv) before eventually unsubscribing a couple months ago. There’s certainly plenty to love, though the price can be a bit to stomach when you realize how much you’re paying for email compared to other services.

Superhuman’s central strength is speed. Its other strength is that it feels like an exclusive club, though its members probably have nicer things to say about it than The Battery.

More on its functional differentiators in a bit, but the culture surrounding the app is a little fascinating. It’s a luxury app icon to have on your phone. You won’t find the Superhuman app in the App Store, you have to be approved for the service in iOS’s TestFlight where constant beta updates are delivered.

Other founders I’ve chatted with have been inspired by how Superhuman’s on-boarding process helps users feel like they’re getting a product custom-built for them. I met with Vohra during my 30-minute meeting where he walked me through the product and asked me about my own email habits as he helped me set up my account. The result is a bizarre connection with the product and team.

Example: for 30 days after you set up your account, you get an email from Vohra detailing some tips and tricks for using the service. Not only did I not immediately unsubscribe from these messages, I read almost all of them. When I filled out a survey at the end surrounding what I thought about the service, an employee at the startup shot me an email a few days later with a full response, I responded to that.

But honestly, how many paid services would expect its users to include a line in their signature plugging the service “Sent via Superhuman” and never disable it? And yet, the cult of Superhuman led me to keep it for awhile until my eyes were opened that flexing my $30/month email in my signature made me look like an asshole. Yes, it did.

What all of these interaction earn Superhuman is that when reality eventually beamed on me that I was not making VC money and I should probably end this little experiment, I almost felt like I had to apologize to the startup for cancelling my subscription. I felt so coddled as a member of the service with every new little update feeling like a new membership perk.

Okay, okay, yes, there are other ways to feel special that aren’t a $30/month electronic mail service. What is so nice about using it?

Speed is the top-line item. The desktop experience is the platform’s key differentiator, it’s structured entirely around keyboard shortcuts and the app is constantly training you to move through your email more quickly.

A couple of months in, I truly was spending far less time combing through pitches and tips, particularly thanks to the custom buckets that Superhuman sorts your mail into. The “Important” tab in your inbox differentiates newsletters and mailing list emails and only sucks in messages that were sent directly to you. It is miles better than the rudimentary sorting that Gmail pulls off.

If you aren’t used to the cult of “inbox-zero,” the service will drag you into it. The app prompts you to archive, snooze or delete every email in your inbox, transforming the utility of the service from a simple mailbox into a to-do list.

Other features like the souped up email tracking lets you know when your email was opened and does this much better than the free Gmail extensions I’ve tried. When a founder tried to claim he hadn’t seen my email asking him about some problems at his startup, I checked the app and saw he had opened it no less than 17 times on his phone and PC. Hmmm…

Before starting Superhuman, Vohra founded Rapportive which LinkedIn later bought. He kind of recreated that service for Superhuman which really allows you to get into people’s inboxes more easily. If you can guess someone’s email, a sidebar in the app will populate with a bio of the person if you’re correct. This is obviously pretty useful to a journalist, but if you’re trying to cold email your way into new opportunities it can be pretty great as well.

I’m perhaps not enough of a power user to get the most of snippets, which allow you to quickly inject canned responses that you can stylize, but they seem like they’d be amazing for intros though I rarely ended up using them.

When it comes to shortcomings, Superhuman is a desktop experience first-and-foremost. I’m a heavy mobile email user and the Superhuman app may have better than most other iOS email apps I had used, but it is still iterative on mobile and I think I was left thinking about the subscription costs most when I was swiping through emails there.

Even in the six months that I was a subscriber the mobile app made some hefty advances, though getting people to continually justify a subscription over what would otherwise be free is a challenge that won’t go away as long as it holds its price tag.

The issue for Superhuman is that in a lot of ways the app just trains you how to use email more effectively. Since cancelling my subscription, I’ve dialed in my Gmail keyboard shortcuts and shifted how I flag and archive messages and I’d say I’m operating fairly close to the efficiency I pulled off on the premium service.

The mental load of spending $30 month on email is admittedly heavy and is undoubtedly a barrier for Superhuman scaling to different echelons of users, but with $33 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the startup certainly has some options for how it grows from here. I do still dearly miss the “Important” tab, email tracking and sidebar profiles and perhaps I will eventually return though I imagine that will happen when the service costs less than what I put into Apple Music and Netflix combined.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | My six months with /month email service Superhuman

French startup Ornikar is raising a $40 million Series B round (€35 million) from Idinvest and Bpifrance. The company competes with traditional driving schools in Europe with an online marketplace of students and teachers.

And Ornikar has been a massive success in France. Overall, 35 percent of driving school registrations in 2019 are handled by Ornikar.

There are many advantages in choosing Ornikar. For driver students, Ornikar is much more flexible than a traditional driving school. Driving schools in France are usually pretty small with only a handful of employees. It’s sometimes hard to book lessons, especially if you have a full-time work.

When you sign up to Ornikar, you can connect to your Ornikar account and book an hour or two from there. Ornikar works with a pool of 650 instructors so that you get to study at your own pace.

Ornikar is also cheaper than a traditional driving school. By automating the administration work as much as possible, the startup says that it is 35 percent cheaper than a traditional driving school. It currently costs €750 for 20 hours of lessons.

“We’ve been profitable in 2018 and very profitable in 2019 for the French market,” Ornikar co-founder and CEO Benjamin Gaignault told me.

Here are some numbers. Every month, 30,000 people sign up to Ornikar in France. The startup manages 70,000 hours of lessons per month on its marketplace.

Ornikar works with qualified instructors who got a license to work in a driving school. They get paid €15 per hour, which is theoretically more than in a normal driving school.

With today’s funding round, the startup wants to expand to more countries. Ornikar is already live in Germany and Spain, but the company wants to grow the product there. Eventually, the company will also expand to Italy and the U.K.

In addition to new countries, Ornikar wants to sell other car-related products. The company is partnering with third-party companies for car insurance products, and there will be more products down the road.

Ornikar had previously raised an $11.3 million Series A (€10 million) and a $1.3 million seed round (€1 million). Existing investors include Brighteye, Partech, Elaia, Xavier Niel, Jacques-Antoine Granjon and Marc Simoncini.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Ornikar raises million for its driving school marketplace