Did you watch Game 7 of the World Series? If you did, you certainly were in good company. On Fox Sports’ FS Go streaming platform alone, 100 million minutes were spent watching the Chicago Cubs’ ultimate path to victory, and each streamer spent an average of 93 minutes watching the game on a digital platform. That’s a lot of audience attention and engagement.
So why do so many marketers’ online video strategies involve ad impressions that are as little as three seconds in length? If you’re doing this, not only are you not buying real video impressions, but more importantly, you’re not buying an environment that’s ripe for the consumption of video.
This fall, it was announced Facebook was calculating its average time spent on video ads by only counting those views that were over three seconds in length. That's the threshold Facebook applies to just about everything it measures, so perhaps this isn’t too surprising -- making that average time spent seem much greater than it actually was.
The end result of this “miscommunication” is that the perception of its users’ engagement may have been inflated by as much as 80%. And this is a much bigger problem than Facebook. Those marketing dollars were lost not because of “miscommunication,” but because they were spent buying video ads on a platform that isn’t a video platform.
But, you may point out, there’s tons of video on Facebook -- why isn’t it a video platform?
For the most part, you don’t access Facebook to watch video entertainment. If you watch a video there, it’s because a friend’s status update happened to include the sharing of a short video. You accessed it in the first place for the friend, not the video. It’s a static page with rich media, not a video platform as defined by the dominance of sight, sound, and motion.
The ad industry is starting to wake up to the fact that not all attention is created equal -- and that platform matters.
A recent editorial in The Drum identified the alarming problem with the fact that, well beyond Facebook, advertisers are spending millions of dollars on ads that aren’t working. But let’s take it a step further and identify why. When we lack standards for measuring human attention, we start comparing things to one another that really aren’t comparable.
Motivational state is key.
In media environments and platforms that encourage users to drive their experience--say scrolling through a feed on a multifunction mobile device--and to direct their attention and discover content in a goal-oriented way, much of the advertising, even targeted ads, is reduced to irrelevance.
There is proven scientific theory supporting the passive-immersive nature of long-form video entertainment content. The expectations that consumers bring to their experience makes it the highest-impact environment for video advertising.
The impetus that a consumer brings to a social communication platform is far different from the one that a consumer brings to long-form video. Social platforms are experienced in a more cognitive state, and brand relevance has to be pre-existing for the ads to have a chance of breaking through.
Consumers are going to be more receptive to video ads when consuming video content is the reason they are on that platform in the first place.
This is why advertising always works best when it matches its medium.
When TV was in its infancy, ads on TV were effectively radio ads with a static image overlay. This, understandably, wasn’t at its maximum effectiveness. Consumers were there to watch, not just to listen. At the root of recognizing this is the understanding of differences in the communication value of different media and platforms, and the power of video content as a messaging medium. Just because platform can transmit a video ad doesn’t mean it’s the optimal platform for doing so.
Facebook's ad effectiveness research appears to support this.
In a published study using Nielsen Online Brand Effects, Facebook--sensitive to the prevalence of data revealing that half of its users immediately bypass ads, and its otherwise shockingly low completion and high sound-off rates--showed that users who only watched an ad for under three seconds actually created 47% of the (unquantified) brand lift value and a staggering 44% of purchase intent.
In fewer than three seconds. This suggests pretty explicitly that any recognition of the brand was based on pre-existing interest and intent. It was brand reinforcement of value created elsewhere (probably in longform video), but with very little opportunity to reinforce.
Social video advertising has benefited from the assumptions tied to the sight/sound/motion impact of TV content-based video advertising, without taking the underlying context into adequate consideration, and as though precision targeting is a purely additive benefit of social.
Social and long-form video advertising are not on a level playing field. Another factor clouding our vision is the fact that TV content is the most shared, discussed and interacted about subject in social, and entertainment trailers are undoubtedly the best performing video ad type. But social media is not television.
It's not Facebook's fault that we've forgotten much of what we know about how media and advertising work; it's time to press the reset button and remember. Context has always mattered in advertising, and when we want to be engaging in high-quality storytelling to build brand awareness and drive purchase intent, the best mediums are those where high-quality storytelling is what audiences are seeking out in the first place.
Some very interesting and valid points, Audrey. One of the lessons that digital ad sellers as well as advertisers need to learn is that the mindset of "the audience" and the relevance o fthe program context is a vital factor but also that you can't measure ad impact to any meaningful extent using electronic indicators alone, including time spent. You must meld these with human responses--ad recall, message registration, changes in brand purchase intent, etc. to get a more complete picture. Two of the reasons why branding advertisers who rely on TV are becoming disenchanted with digital is the lack of human response metrics as well as the very short supply of engaging "long form" video content. It remains to be seen whether digital ad sellers will recognize these as a problem and begin to understand how branding advertisers really think and operate, rather than trying to get them to march to a different, all-electronic, drummer.
Is there a reference you have for this statement?
"There is proven scientific theory supporting the passive-immersive nature of long-form video entertainment content. The expectations that consumers bring to their experience makes it the highest-impact environment for video advertising."
Thanks for this insightful examination Audrey, I agree with Ed, you make many valid points on the importance of context for the content experience. But the sea change in the platform providing the viewing experience that YouTube represents in many ways is more critical than Facebook as the way Millennials "tune in" and engage with the YouTube environment has precipitated revolutionary viewing habits.
Fortunately, not all "digital sellers" are created equal- at CBS we serve our marketing partners by using our story-telling experience, talent, and production quality to create branded video content experiences that deliver engagement way beyond 3 seconds across all of our viewer touchpoints, including our YouTube channels, and that's a drum roll every brand can hear.