Commentary

Detergent Dominates, Women Still The Desired Video Demo

Seen an ad for detergent in front of that episode of “Modern Family” you watched on Hulu last night? Or maybe the latest “Glee” on Fox.com ? Or a pre-roll spot for soda?

Well, don’t worry. They’ll come. Because consumer packaged goods companies continue to dominate the online video advertising landscape, according to the latest quarterly report from online video ad technology company YuMe. The company analyzed in-stream video advertising across its ad network, which delivers more than 1.5 billion video impressions each month, and concluded that the CPG category continues to shell out to put its messages in front of consumers parked in front of their laptops to watch TV or Web video.

About 23% of online video ad spending came from CPG companies, a rise from 17% in the second quarter. Pharma and telecom clocked in second and third, at 16% and 15%, respectively, of the share of spending.

Entertainment advertising only comprised 8% of the spend. This number stands out to me in particular because you’d think it would be higher — marketing movies online seems a natural fit. To be sure, the share of entertainment marketing is rising from earlier this year, but my hunch is that movies studios are shying away from big buys in online video because they still want the opening day push that comes from ads running on TV on Thursday evenings or home page portal takeovers on Fridays to drive butts to theater seats.

Another interesting tidbit is that advertisers are aiming to reach women online more than men — the spending on female-targeted campaigns was triple that of male-targeted campaigns. That speaks to the buying power of women even though they’re watching less online video than men. Nielsen recently reported that women 18 to 49 watch about five hours of video online each month, compared to seven hours for men 18 to 49.

Pre-rolls still dominate, and in the pre-roll family, the 15-second variety has the highest completion rate at 79%, an increase from 72% in the second quarter. But Web viewers are also sitting through 30-second spots too. They watch them to completion 68% of the time, up from 64% in the second quarter.

Separately, Casale Media released a survey saying that while digital video ad spending should rise 25% in the next year, nearly 40% of media planners said measuring ROI is too difficult in online video.

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