• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, July 23, 2013

Innovid, the tech platform that is built around delivering interactive advertising, today is releasing its Interactive Video Advertising Benchmarks: H1 2013. Not surprisingly given the source, it shows that in all the best ways that video ads are measured, interactive out performs regular, old pre-roll by emphatic margins.

As a sample of that, according to the study, advertisers running ordinary  pre-roll got an average 19.7% awareness rate, compared to 40.4% when using Innovid’s suite of iRoll interactive enhancements. Pre-roll campaigns generated a 76.5% viewing rate but campaigns using iRoll generated an 84.4%. rate.

 The company’s co-founder and CTO, Tal Chalozin,  says  Innovid’s natural allies in interactive have, so far, been gaming, entertainment and automotive advertisers—you can probably recall interactive applications for a new car you might have investigated, or additional trailers for a movie you’re interested in seeing. (A recent Innovid concocted ad for the film “This Is the End” seems to have set the high-water mark for extra time spent by viewers who clicked to see more clips.  In part, no doubt, that was because the film starred just about every trending  male comedian of the last year or two.)

“There were a lot of pieces of content,” Chalozin says. “It just created a canvas of material.”  Indeed, entertainment advertising is interactive sweetest spot. It generates the most user activity (5.5 percent) and time earned (35.73 seconds). Consumer packaged goods and beverage commercials get the highest completion rate (77%) and average percentaage of ads viewed (84.3%)

Now, Chalozin says, Innovid is “crossing the chasm,” expanding to other verticals like insurance, travel, and consumer electronics.  The investment in interactive, he says “is very small. The  return is very, very high. But it’s still not top of mind for many brand marketers.”  

The value proposition, basically, is that a 15 or 30 second commercial buyer with interactive components gets bonus time every time a user clicks on another interactive offering.  

Innovid claims that in its study of 2,300 campaigns in the first half of 2013, interactive advertisers received a 161% increase in brand exposure without additional media spend.

Innovid says its iRoll campaigns  gave advertisers an average 27.83 seconds in time earned. You can do the math. That almost doubles the the time spent with a traditional 30-second spot.  Interactive also has the ability to track viewability. Users manipulating a mouse around a video is a dead give-away that they’re actually seeing the spot.   

 pj@mediapost.com