From tasty snacks to toilet paper, consumer packaged-goods are keeping online video providers in business, according to new data from video ad network YuMe. More than any other category, CPG remained the top spender in the third quarter of the year, making up a full 23% of all video ad spending. Even more remarkable, the share of spending by CPG advertisers increased from 17% since the second quarter of the year. To put those figures into perspective, pharmaceutical advertising increased its share of online video spending from 13% to 16% from the second to the third quarter of the year, YuMe found. Not surprisingly, consumers ages 25-54 were the most requested demographic among marketers, making up 15% of RFP volume -- up from 11% last quarter. Separately, spending on female-targeted campaigns was triple that of male-targeted campaigns, while spend on non-gender-specific campaigns increased from 56% in the second quarter to 62% in the third quarter of the year. Similarly, females 25-54 were the most requested female demographic in the third quarter, while males 18-34 were the most requested male target at 31%, with requests increasing from 22% in the second quarter. Also of note, pre-roll advertising continues to be the most utilized format, as it represented a full 90.5% of YuMe’s volume in the third quarter. Still, mobile impressions increased by 35%, from 2% to 2.7% of total impressons served, according to YuMe. Also, 30-second video made up the majority of impressions, at 55%, for the first time in 2011, while 15-second pre-roll delivered the highest completion rates -- 79%. The majority of ad impressions that YuMe served were in California at 11.1% of total volume, followed by New York at 8.2% and Texas at 7.0%. As YuMe serves ads on more than 1,500 publisher sites, report statistics are generated from data recorded with every ad request and ads served across its network.
Brands and agencies will increase spending on digital video advertising by 25% over the next 12 months, according to a new report from Casale Media. If accurate, that will amount to about 23.8% of total online ad budgets, it estimates. Casale’s report, however, notes that such growth will require several factors -- chief among them the removal of operational barriers. Indeed, more than one-third of those surveyed in the Casale Media study found the planning --38% -- creative -– 40% -- and execution -- 35% -- phases to be difficult. "When it comes to video, many online advertisers still perceive it as the Wild West because it continues to evolve and grow, but without giving publishers and advertisers enough control," said Joe Casale, CEO of Casale Media. Separately, a recent study by eMarketer found that 85% of advertisers and ad buyers are more likely to book video ads if the planning, creative and execution of video ad campaigns are more simple and painless. Casale also calls for increased “awareness” of video’s effectiveness. Marketers and agencies already view digital video advertising as one of the most effective ways to realize brand lift. A full 80% of the survey's respondents use video ads to increase awareness of traditional and new brands, products and/or services. Finally, Casale notes that future video ad growth depends on better ad measurement and return on investment. The most common responses to why marketers are not using digital video advertising more are because it is too difficult to measure ROI, at 40%, and there is not enough ROI to justify increasing spend, at 38%. The report, "Digital Video Advertising: Removing Barriers Equals Greater Opportunities," was based on an October 2011 research study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions for Casale Media, which surveyed roughly 150 media buyers, managers and planners at leading advertisers and agencies in the United States.
Conductor released a feature Wednesday in its search engine optimization platform Searchlight that optimizes and measures digital assets, such as video and images, in Google’s universal organic search results. More than 80% of every search conducted on Google includes digital assets, such as news, videos or shopping results. The features allow brands to measure the impact of these results on their site traffic and improve the ranking and traffic from their digital assets. For retailers, more than 95% of keywords have digital assets such as shopping results. Brands do not have the visibility to determine how non-standard assets and content impact their business. They also don't know how to optimize them, according to Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor. The feature, Digital Asset Measurement, took three years to build. "It's actually one of the hardest things we have done," he said. Conductor engineers had to build technology that crawls search engine pages, downloads all content and parses and re-renders all videos and assets. That information, more than 20 terabytes of data, must show up in real-time to clients through a dashboard. The platform also suggests creating videos that don't exist tied to keywords that have a good chance of ranking high in search results. It means engineering the process of ranking high for specific keywords placed in tags and titles of videos. Apparently, it provides a new opportunity to grow traffic to Web sites. Prior to launching this tool, Conductor set out to determine the pervasiveness of universal results for high-volume keywords. Executives wanted to know the frequency with which universal search results appear for high-volume queries, as well as the distribution of result types. Along with the optimization feature, Conductor released a study that answers questions related to the impact of non-standard assets, such as YouTube videos. To answer this question, company executives analyzed the search engine results -- more than 4,200 of the most expensive paid keywords across several industries. Advertisers take an interest in the natural search makeup of the keywords because they invest significant dollars in them through paid-search marketing campaigns, according to the report. The study also finds that local results, such as Local and Maps, appeared 14% and 12% of the time, respectively, although this number can increase significantly when marketers focus on geocentric queries. The study focused on a mix of geo- and non-geo terms.
Netflix may be hitting more than a few bumps on the road -- but from a pure bandwidth share of video it is still way ahead of other video sites. Netflix now accounts for 32.7% share of peak time video traffic -- this from a new survey by Sandvine, a bandwidth management company. This is up from Netflix's 20% share of U.S. bandwidth consumption, according to a Sandvine 2010 study. Sandvine says "peak" time period demand is a two-hour evening period -- 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Overall streaming video represents 60% of all peak downstream bandwidth use. YouTube was in a distant second place in the current study -- 11.3% of "peak" traffic. But YouTube is still way ahead in other areas. The survey says the majority of broadband users -- 83% -- click on YouTube compared with 20% that utilize Netflix. Major differences between Netflix and YouTube: Netflix users spend 77% of the time watching its videos from a TV-connected device; 20% of viewing is on a PC; and 3% is on a mobile device. The numbers are virtually opposite that on YouTube. There is an 83% usage of YouTube on computers; 10% on mobile and 7% on connected TVs. Overall, 55% of streaming video traffic comes via game consoles, set-top boxes, broadband-connected TVs and mobile devices in the home; 45% comes from desktop and laptop computers.