• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, April 11, 2013

One of the most wonderful and yet most vexing things about the online video business is the plethora of research being released each day. Numbers and stats make the lives of brands and agencies both easier and harder. Which research should you rely on? Which report should you ignore?

There are a few recent studies that bear a closer look because they point to rising trends that have great impact for both TV and online video. What’s more, these studies dive into the intersection of TV and online video.

For starters, Forrester aimed to quantify the real-time bidding market for video earlier this week with a report that said programmatic buying and real-time bidding will account for about 25% of all online video ad spend in 2014, or $1.14 billion. The study found that real-time bidding for video more then doubled from 2011 to 2012, representing the fastest-growing segment of the online video business. Real-time bidding will account for nearly half the growth in online video between 2012 and 2014, the report says.

Does that mean online video is moving away from being a branding vehicle? No.  This means brands are learning to take advantage of one of the biggest benefit of Web advertising: more precision in data and analytics. Plus, media buyers like real-time bidding because they can use it to complement more traditional reach campaigns with additional targeting. “While advertisers have begun to move a small percentage of TV budget to online video, those dollars represent a major influx of revenue into this green-field medium. As buyers learn how to fill in the gaps of campaigns, they will use RTB to maximize reach, frequency, or sales-lift gaps midflight,” Forrester says.

If we’re going to hone in on the targeting crossover between online videos, let’s keep in mind that marketers should target by devices as well. In its just-released report, online video tech firm Ooayala found that 47% of all broadcast tablet video viewed was a half hour to an hour long, and that audiences watch twice as much tablet TV on the weekends. Those findings suggest marketers would we wise to layer device targeting into online video buys.

But while targeting online video may be a key underpinning of this sector in the next few years, not all marketers have hopped on the online video train. Kantar Media studied more than 4,100 brands using online video and national TV, and found that only 12% were using both media. In addition, about one-quarter were using online video overall, with 11% using it exclusively. A whopping 77% used national TV exclusively. Restaurants and car makers were most likely to use both, with 43% of the former and 30% of the latter in this category.