While brand manufacturers typically track key performance indicators (KPIs) like average order value (AOV), return on ad spend (ROAS), and churn rates, there’s another emerging metric that can help them effectively gauge growth: content effectiveness.
Jehan Hamedi, founder and CEO of Vizit, shared how the company and other brands are leveraging AI to enhance performance during his session, “Turning Content Into a Growth KPI,” at the 2025 Digital Shelf Summit.
Here’s how brands are converting visual content into a key business driver, and what this could mean for the future of ecommerce.
Measuring Content Effectiveness With Vizit
Visual content drives buying decisions. Ninety-five percent of purchasing decisions happen when the brain is processing visual information, and 88% of consumers consider product images essential to the online shopping experience, according to Hamedi.
“In this scroll-see, click-type world, where we have less than two seconds to get our customers' attention and our shoppers' attention, the power of visuals really matters,” he says.
Vizit has fully embraced this ethos with its visual AI solution. The tool uses AI to score content effectiveness, modeling trillions of online behaviors that consumers exhibit across more than 40 countries and thousands of product categories.
AI Allows Brands To See Content Through Consumers’ Eyes
Vizit has patented “audience lenses,” a technology that allows brands to examine their content from the shopper’s perspective. The platform also generates a scorecard that helps brands assess the conversion power of their product images.
All these capabilities are vital, as brands invest millions to drive traffic to product pages but are losing high-intent buyers because of ineffective content, to the tune of up to 40% in potential sales, according to Hamedi.
“If you want to know what good looks like, you don't need to look through your eyes, you need to look through your shopper's eyes. That's never been possible [before], but AI has blown that barrier away.” — Jehan Hamedi, Founder and CEO, Vizit
Turning Content Into a Growth KPI at L’Oréal
In today’s world of ever-changing search algorithms, winning the search engine optimization (SEO) war is no longer enough. Hamedi shares how Vizit gives brands like L’Oréal a strategic advantage they can use to increase their content effectiveness — and wring more value out of every marketing dollar they spend.
According to Hamedi, at L’Oréal, content effectiveness has become a globally reported metric within the company. This new measurement approach helps the brand make better decisions about what to prioritize and what content to optimize. It also provides an important data point for L’Oréal’s digital team to inform the company’s retail media investments.
“If you want to decide which SKUs you want to pump a bunch of paid traffic into, you should probably do that to the ones that have the best-looking content and that have the highest chance of conversion,” Hamedi says.
L’Oréal is just one example of the value of using AI to improve product content performance. Across Vizit’s customer base, companies are capitalizing on the technology to implement new content workflows to drive sales, while reducing the time to create, test, and identify optimization opportunities.
Delivering AI-Optimized Product Experiences
Hamedi contends that “The fastest path to a sales lift is one better image.”
That’s not the only benefit brands are reaping from integrating AI into the product content journey. Hamedi adds that visual AI delivers content quality data that also fosters better collaboration across teams.
It creates a shared language and connective thread between product development, content, and other functional teams across the company, establishing a shared truth that elevates each of their departments, but also eliminates a lot of pain and frustration.
By measuring content effectiveness, ecommerce teams can also tell a better revenue story about content’s impact on the business.
“That completely changes the narrative away from ‘We made these assets because we had to make these assets’ to ‘They are literally the hardest working things on the internet in our category, and we are winning share because of them.’ It just flips the whole narrative.” — Jehan Hamedi, Founder and CEO, Vizit
How Content Effectiveness Helps Brand-Retailer Relationships
Content effectiveness metrics also help brands forge stronger relationships with retailers, according to Hamedi. Gathering and activating this data across their product portfolio signals to retail partners that a brand is equally invested in their success and is proactively taking steps to help them grow in key product categories.
But Hamedi says it’s not enough just to achieve content wins; ecommerce teams also must celebrate and communicate them regularly across the organization.
These efforts streamline best-practice sharing across global teams and build buy-in with internal leaders who decide which investments the company will make.
So, teams must socialize content effectiveness as a KPI and make it clear why it’s such an important strategic asset.
The Future of AI-Enabled Product Content
In the near future, we’ll likely see more brands use AI more broadly across their operations. They’ll particularly turn to generative AI — which produces new text and images from source data — to scale content creation, Hamedi says.
He refers to the technology as a “powerful creative agency on demand.” However, the scale and velocity of content AI can produce also comes with risks that can undermine content quality and effectiveness if brands don’t govern the technology properly.
“Just because you are generating lots of things doesn't mean those are good things,” Hamedi says.
To combat ineffective content, brands will need to combine scaling content with good measurement. Teams will need to scale, score, measure, and report on every content asset.
"Content is an extremely efficient growth driver and content health will be measured as a KPI across products, brands, retailers, and markets," Hamedi predicts.
‘Bullish’ on AI ROI
Hamedi also envisions a future where brands use AI to fuel an “always-on content optimization engine,” one that easily identifies high-performing content, helps teams enrich underperforming content, and automatically refreshes content to create a continuous customer conversion cycle.
“I'm super excited and super bullish for where AI is today,” Hamedi says. “The commerce industry as a whole — every one of us — is primed to make an incredible return on our AI investments over the next two years.”
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