With the mobile and tablet market growing daily, it comes as no surprise to many that more TV ad spend dollars are shifting to online video. eMarketer estimates that by 2015, 76% of Internet users, or
195.5 million people, will watch video content online every month. For advertisers, this means online video ad spend could increase to $5.71 billion by 2015, most of which will come out of TV budgets.
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.