• by Adam Singolda , July 10, 2013

66% of Internet budgets are ruled by performance, the rest by CPM.

TV is exactly the opposite. Operated in a less quantifiable environment but much bigger, TV is mostly ruled by top-of-the-funnel awareness budgets.

Advertisers are sophisticated and tap into each platform differently. In one they will make you aware, measuring stores’ sales over time, while in the other they can measure if you liked a Facebook Fan page, and returned the day after. 

The online video market, growing to be $9 billion this year, is defined for the most part by the amount of pre-rolls/media sold a year against inventory of video views. This is largely similar to how the TV market is defined, which is by the amount of TV-spots/ media sold. It’s a market that is about $70 billion without including the local TV markets.

All of that is good, as more quality inventory is a positive thing, and now with companies like Nielsen and AOL helping to measure it, things will progress even faster.

However, when it comes to online video, brands are starting to leverage more than pre-rolls, whether it’s to drive awareness, interest, consideration and even sales -- a market defined as “video marketing” (content marketing). 

There is a growing trend of brands becoming publishers, investing in creating engaging content – a trend also recently supported by Google. Videos created by a brand will be different from a 30-second spot, or even a 60-second advertorial that can run before a video. Brands will create the actual content: stories the brands wish to tell. These videos will usually be part of an overall content strategy where the videos will speak to some targeted audience, sparking awareness, educating interest, and even discovering potential buyers out there in the measurable and quantifiable (wonderful) Internet.

Don’t think about producing a single video of someone running with a shoe. Think about producing 50 videos about tips for city runners on a micro site on the shoe’s company blog, or maybe on a YouTube channel.

This opens a whole huge opportunity for brands. Runners could now start visiting a brand’s site daily, weekly or monthly, much as they visit any other site or blog they like to follow. They could easily watch those videos on their mobile or tablet devices, and may share those videos, creating earned media for the brand. Some would even buy shoes.

Quality inventory provides brands with the opportunity to tell a story, and that opportunity is gone in 30 seconds. Video marketing is giving brands a new channel to reach their audiences, and that is by creating engaging videos, an ongoing conversation, and reaching people who care to watch it.

Exciting times to be in the video space whether you’re a publisher, a brand or someone connecting the two: gone-in-30 seconds video marketing.