• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 29, 2016

Good copy can still do wonders. Yet driven by the ad popularity of Instagram and other image-driven platforms, brands are more visually oriented than ever.

In fact, Brand Networks saw ad impressions on the popular social network Instagram rise more than 13-fold from 50 million in August  2015 to 670 million in December.

The ad network expects to be delivering more than 1 billion monthly Instagram ad impressions by the end of the first quarter.

Among those marketing professionals, per a new report from the in-image ad platform, 92% agreed that visual elements were somewhat important or very important to their delivering their consumer marketing initiatives.

Survey results were culled from more than 200 members of the Brand Innovators community.

Eighty-four percent of marketers said further advancements in image recognition technology are needed to unlock the full marketing potential of the visual Web.

When asked how spending on specific tactics pertaining to the visual Web will change in the coming year, the highest anticipated increase will be in visual storytelling (54%) and social platforms (53%).

When asked about the importance of the visual Web for the future of digital marketing, nearly everyone surveyed (96%) said it would be either somewhat important or very important.

Still, only about half of those surveyed (51%) said they were somewhat familiar or very familiar with the term “visual Web.”

Instagram’s ad surge can be attributed to its decision to offer its application programming interface to outside parties in August. With the change, brands and their developer teams were invited to plug their software directly into Instagram’s API.