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.