In this year's first quarter, beverage/spirits ads generated the highest average interaction among all online/digital ads across 24 vertical industries, powered by advertising technology/services provider Unicast.
Results of this first of regular, quarterly analytics benchmark reports from Unicast show beverage/spirits ads generating an average interaction rate of 8.62%. Other vertical ad categories with high interaction rates included retail (8.24%), TV entertainment (5.06%), advertising/marketing (3.9%), DVD/video entertainment (3.87%), and film entertainment (3.08%).
Verticals with the lowest interaction rates included education (0.02%), politics/government (0.04%), sporting goods (0.12%), Internet services (0.26%), apparel (0.31%) and restaurants (0.38%).
The interaction rate for consumer packaged goods was quite high (2.78%), and these ads also produced the longest average interaction time (56 seconds) across verticals -- mostly because of their high use of synchronized banners. Other verticals with high interaction time included sporting goods (50 seconds) and technology (36 seconds). The latter two verticals tended to use "pushdown" and expanding multi-panel units, respectively.
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Videos, polls, quizzes and games are notably effective at increasing engagement times, the metrics show.
Format-wise, instant messaging units had the highest interaction rate (19.9%) and nearly the highest in average exposure time (51 seconds, versus synchronized banners' 57 seconds). Branded canvas ad formats (custom interactive units positioned within full-episode video players) and 3D "video cubes" also produced both very high interaction rates (7.23% and 4.23%, respectively) and fairly high average video view/play times (23.7 and 9 seconds, respectively).
The high performance of such formats is not surprising, given that they incorporate three of digital's hottest trends -- social media, online video and 3D content, notes the Unicast report. Features common to many of the highest-interaction creative executions include HD, MovieFinder, full-screen video, live streaming video and social media integration features such as Twitter feeds and social network posting/sharing.
Other insights from the benchmark study:
Highest interactoin rates. What exactly are you talking about here? This is more of the jabberwocky handed out by many of the online vendors and "researchers". You've made news out of useless (ie, non-actionable, unexplained, unsubstantiated) data points. PLEASE stop wasting our time and your energy with this drivel.