• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 13, 2014

It’s gotten harder to discover the actual news in the monthly comScore Video Metrix tally, which invariably produces record number of video views of some sort, usually dominated by YouTube, AOL, Facebook, Vevo, among others.

The December rankings didn’t set off alarms (again), but if you keep a big pile of comScore releases handy, you’ll notice that in December 2012, Americans watched 11.3 billion video ads. A year later, that figure more than tripled, to 35.2 billion. That’s a record.

All that ad watching adds up, too. In 2012, comScore stats say time spent watching video advertising totaled 4.1 billion minutes. This year, that pushed to 13.2 billion minutes.

Altogether, the stats are amazing, but they are every month. In December, a little more 188 million Americans watched 52.4 billion videos, not just advertising related ones. A year before, 182 billion watched 38.7 billion. That’s stupendous growth too, the first time American’s have watched more than 50 billion videos in a month.

(At CES, they were showing a wristwatch that automatically buzzes every five minutes, so you stay constantly aware of how life is slipping by.)

Off the printed comScore stats for a second, it might be—in fact it must be—that Americans have developed a tolerance of (resignation about) video pre-roll. But also, the explosion of longer form ads, such as the much-touted Dove “Real Beauty” ads (over five minutes long) and native advertising, are adding to the totals in measurable ways.

What’s to knock — beyond the whole fuzziness of native advertising? If consumers knows they’re seeing sponsored content and decide to watch it, well, it is still a more or less free country.   

Well, I guess I do have one knock.  SearchEngineWatch.com notes that YouTube stats show that in December, “Kobe vs. Messi: The Selfie Shootout,”  which clocks in at one minute, was YouTube’s top-viewed ad, with 135.5 million views, more than any other YouTube ad last year. The superstars are shown in sites around the world photographing themselves, in a race of sorts. Fun to watch.    

It was done for Turkish Airlines. Now I know something called Turkish Airlines exists, and so do millions of other. What do I do with that?  Wouldn’t it be better if it first did a more conventional ad campaign that points out it now flies to 104 countries, more than any other carrier in the world?  That message is first delivered with an on-screen graphic 54 seconds in and disappears seconds later.    

While it might be slightly late in this column to make the point, the fact that people are watching more video ads, and watching them for a longer time, reinforces the idea that more than ever, it would be a good time for marketers to know why they’re producing these ads, as watchable as they are. I know it’s late for a prediction for 2014, but I would bet you a lot of money I won’t be going anywhere on Turkish Airlines this year, and I’ll bet just slightly less that neither will you. Great ad, though.

pj@mediapost.com