• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 13, 2011

Context matters for video advertising, but especially in matters of engagement and immediate action. According to the first stream report on traffic and ad performance trends from Tremor Media's Video Hub analytics platform, the company finds that different signals have widely varied impact on ad effectiveness and satisfying an advertisers specific marketing goals.

To wit: the publisher hosting the video was the single greatest determinant of engagement with video as well as time spent. To a lesser but still strong degree the content category in which the video was encountered impacted the same metrics. Context generally, both the publisher involved and the content category were far and away more important than other signals in determining click through rates on an ad.  Using Tremor's Video Impact Index as a relative measure, for instance, the publisher impact indexed at  12.17 for engagement, compared to audience signals such as age (3.56), gender (3,13) and income (2.45) which all indexed considerably lower.

But when it comes to brand lift, however, publisher and content category were remarkably less impactful (indexing at 6.57 and 4.63 respectively) than the viewer's gender (13.23) or geographic location (9.56).

The data suggests that when it comes to brand metrics, the composition of the audience and relevance to circumstance are the key determinants. But when it comes to engaging people in the content and even finding them in a state where they are most likely to act, context is most important.

The first video Hub report also finds that in July music, TV and gaming thoroughly dominated video consumption. In its overview of 1 billion streams across 1,000 publishers in 20 verticals, 28% of the streams it saw in the system contained music content. Another 26.1% was TV-related. And 23.6% had game content. In fact, the top three categories, all entertainment-oriented, accounted for more than three-quarters of all streams Video Hub observed in July. The next most popular video genre was news and business with a mere 8.9% of streams.
   
Tremor argues in its report that the stream data reveal a complex relationship among content, audience and ad/marketing goals. Content may improve brand lift generally, but they find that the best performing content categories are often very specific to a campaign or a goal. "Branding is bigger than context," the report warns. "It is a lot more complicated than putting your pet ad on a pet channel or your movie trailer on a movie site."