This week, our CEO Randal Cumming traveled to New York City to present on the Hot Topics in Marketing panel at the Digital Media Licensing Association’s annual conference.
CGI.Backgrounds has been a member of the DMLA for over a decade. The trade group represents the interests of visual media companies like ours.
This year’s DMLA conference took place in an inspiring location: the Intrepid Air & Space Museum, a historic aircraft carrier that has been transformed into a world-class floating museum.
The setting perfectly reflected the energy, innovation, and uniqueness of the companies present, as well as the topics we covered.
Randal presented to a group of leaders within the community on the topic of personalized marketing. He was joined on the panel by James Allsworth of Alamy, Jared Bauman of 201 Creative, and Noelle Kim of Envato.
The Power of Interactivity and Personalization
In today’s world, where customers are inundated with massive amounts of AI-generated content, having excellent marketing collateral is no longer enough.
Users now expect messaging from brands to be personalized—matched to their demographics, localized to their physical location and language, and tailored to address their specific needs–and interactive.
This shift unlocks incredible opportunities for companies capable of delivering personalized experiences. However, it also introduces challenges and requires significant resources to accomplish at scale.
Randal highlighted new technologies, including innovations developed by CGI.Backgrounds, that support the interactivity and personalization of brand content. He spoke about tools like online car configurators, which allow customers to visualize and interact with a vehicle before making a purchasing decision.
Randal explained how many of these interactive technologies originated in unexpected places like the sneaker industry. For example, companies including eBay created “digital twins” of sneakers, allowing customers to interact with 3D models of shoes before purchasing.
While visualizing a sneaker is relatively simple, creating an interactive and personalized experience for vehicles in a browser is far more complex.
New Tech to Enable New Experiences
Randal discussed how older technologies made these experiences prohibitively expensive. Pixel streaming, often the only solution for high-quality configurators, could cost millions of dollars to implement.
Older client-side technologies like WebGL offered decent performance but couldn’t match the visual fidelity of pixel-streamed solutions.
However, Randal shared that emerging technologies like WebGPU are transforming the space. WebGPU will soon allow high-quality configurators to render directly on users’ devices.
This means users can customize vehicles according to location, trim, and preferences, add virtual accessories, and interact with the model—all within their browser, and at a much lower cost for brands.
The reduced cost of personalization and interactivity tools will also benefit industries beyond automotive.
Until now, vehicles—being high-ticket items—were among the few products where brands could afford these resource-intensive interactive experiences. However, with costs coming down, industries selling goods like apparel and jewelry will soon be able to implement the same kind of interactivity.
New technologies like artificial intelligence will also make it easier for brands to truly understand their customers, and personalize interactive experiences to their tastes and preferences.
A “Need to Have”
In his talk, Randal shared powerful statistics on the value of interactivity and personalization. These technologies do more than just enhance the customer experience—they lead to higher conversion rates, reduced product returns, and overall improvements in brands’ ROI and other important KPIs.
In other words, customization and personalization are evolving from “nice-to-have” features to “need-to-have” essentials.
Brands will need access to advanced tools and technologies to build these experiences. At CGI.Backgrounds, we’ve been developing interactive solutions for decades. Our industry-leading RAY HDR technology makes it easy to add beautiful and realistic lighting to product renders–both in powerful DCCs like VRED , and in a customer’s browser.
We also have extensive experience working with brands to develop these experiences. One notable example is our work with Aston Martin , which showcases how interactive configurators can enhance the customer journey.
Randal concluded by emphasizing that the future of interactivity and personalization is bright—but only for those who aggressively adopt these new technologies.
Traditional visual media, such as video and static images, are no longer enough for the world’s most impactful brands. Interactivity and personalization represent the future of customer engagement. The brands that embrace these technologies now will be the ones to succeed in the long term.
Want to learn more about Randal’s talk and how you can integrate personalization and interactivity into your own brand strategy?
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