Adobe has released another excellent survey of their Scene7 customers. For those of you who are not familiar with Scene7, it's a great tool or rather a service by Adobe that helps companies incorporate and manage rich media content on their websites. Serving big clients such as Sears and Macy's their price entry is steep with an yearly charge of 30-40K for publishing and managing rich media catalogs online.

The survey was conducted from November 9, 2009 to January 15, 2010. It covers a variety of industries across major markets: North America, Asia-Pacific, Western/Eastern Europe, Middle East , Africa, and Latin America. It's a 60 page document that goes into pretty good details evaluating how different industries/markets plan to adopt latest trends in digital media in 2010 with a primary focus on Interactive Rich Media, Social Media, Mobile Features and Personalization. Total of 546 companies have provided their feedback.

Here's what we found most interesting:
  • Current adoption of 360-degree product views is still very low. Only 7% of all responders have adopted this feature. Though, unsurprisingly, its planned adoption growth in 2010 is highest across all 21 rich media features evaluated. 22% of all responders plan to adopt 360 product images in 2010. This is a 200% increase!
  • Combined with 3-D visualization that shows second fastest growing adoption rate (9% adopted vs 23% planned) and product tours (13% adopted vs 23% planed) we think we have a busy year ahead of us. To give you a comparison point, well established functionality such as Quick Looks/Rollover views and Alternative Images show marginal adoption growth with 20% adopted vs 21% planned and 17% adopted vs 18% planned respectively.
  • Product tours (combinations of guided spin, zoom imagery, videos or animations with copy) is ranked highest in effectiveness across all rated rich media features.
  • 27% more responders said that 360 product spin is the most effective feature to drive conversion/sales comparing to similar survey last year.
  • 70% of survey participants in North America have less that 10 million in annual sales with quarter of all responders being interactive/advertising agencies.

It's great to see companies embracing interactive rich media, and while e-commerce is still in its infancy (Forrester research says only 8% of all sales will be done online in 2014), the trend is clear and this survey only reassures that we are on the right track.

You can request a full copy of the survey here.