Commentary
How To Start Winning At Online Video
- by Bob Dees , June 2, 2011
What can we do as an industry to ensure online video ads make it mainstream? There are a few places everyone can start: standardization, measurement and relevancy, and consumer choice.
Standardization
As an industry, if we plan on becoming as big as TV, we're going to have to work on standardizing our technologies. Video advertising is extremely complex. Ads can come in many different formats: Flash, Flash Video, MP4, Windows Media File, WebM, Audio only, pre-roll (mid, post) vs. overlay vs. companion banners. They can be served in numerous environments, like HTML, Flash, or Silverlight Players.
They can be aired as placeholders, while something else on the page is loading. They can be played before, during or at the end of video content. Making it more difficult, publisher integration capabilities are not the same.
While the IAB is hard at work to develop and deploy online video standards, there is a long way to go before partners and advertisers are all comfortable with video advertising.
Measurement
What's the biggest difference between TV and online video? TV can be measured and optimized, but online video can be measured and optimized to a more granular level, in real-time. Measuring consumer awareness, attitudes, favorability and purchase intent becomes much easier with online than it is with TV. And that translates to huge benefits for online marketers.
Yet along the same lines as the standardization point above, online video will not be able to scale until advertisers collectively figure out how to accurately measure their results. Right now, the first step an advertiser must take is to determine what metrics are most important to them.
Your agency will help you focus on that metric and work for you to drive those results. Is it TV metrics like reach and frequency? GRPs or TRPs? Is it CPM? What about online metrics like CPC, CPE, CPV or CPCV?
Online video is able to offer all the measurement of TV, in addition to critical brand metrics like consumer awareness and purchase intent. Being able to optimize media buys against these brand measures changes the game for marketers as they look to increase brand favorability.
Relevancy and Consumer Choice
Consumers are becoming more proactive than ever in terms of their media consumption. They watch what they want when they want to on the device of their choice. Giving them an option of what ad to watch -- whether it's the choice between a long ad before a program or multiple short ads throughout -- will increase engagement and improve user experience as a whole.
Publishers agree that when a consumer is given their choice of ads, they are more likely to remember them, thus increasing engagement and brand lift.
Furthermore, advertisers are concerned with brand safety, consumer attitudes, contextual relevancy and being device agnostic. Given the choice, advertisers will spend their budgets with publishers that address these issues.
Online video is starting to hold its own as a must-have supplement to traditional TV, but we have a lot of work to do before online budgets become bigger than TV. While quality has improved tremendously in the last couple of years, standardizing video formats, finding accurate measurement tactics, and ensuring relevancy and consumer choice are the first steps toward growing the power behind online video.
Bob, you make some great points on the importance of measurement standards. Based on pace to date, the existing measurement firms and standards bodies may need years to define a standard. To accelerate growth of the pie, it seems those of us in the digital video ecosystem will need to save ourselves. In the meantime, how can we coordinate to define a core set of reporting standards?
Relevancy and consumer choice is a big point. Even what ad you watch is often a choice now.
Gone are the days of cheesy and annoying TV ads. Consumers will avoid those. But if the video has real substance or even entertainment value, they're going to get clicked every time. (maybe even sought out in the case of videos that go viral).
The point is the video content of the future is going to have to be better produced and more relevant to do well. This is what we strive for at Frog Spots as well. People watch what they enjoy and video advertising should be held to the same standard.
I think a more suitable title for this article would be "How to win at online video advertising." Ads are a big part of online video, but we can agree there are many other business models – customer relationships, direct marketing, training, content strategies, search and SEO, social media optimization, etc.