Pro Motion Media Blog

On TV the audi­ence had to have so many impres­sions before they really “saw” your brand and decided to buy. A con­nec­tion had to be made. That’s true online as well, but has changed because con­nec­tions can and are made much faster. With the advent and pro­lif­er­a­tion of new media out­lets, adver­tis­ing has grown in leaps and bounds. We now have YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, Yahoo!, Face­book, LinkedIn, Twitter…and the list can go on for what seems like an eternity!

These days I have the absolute plea­sure to work with a com­pany that pro­vides video pro­duc­tion, in Lon­don, and the whole UK. I can lis­ten to and brain­storm with our clients on how to pro­vide mar­ket­ing mes­sages that not only enter­tain but con­vert to sales! It’s the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of my loves; mar­ket­ing, enter­tain­ment, video, and best of all, sales! Cre­at­ing value in a video is, to me, the most crit­i­cal ele­ment. Videos don’t have to be per­fect but they do have to add value. Allegedly, only 1.2 per­cent of the videos viewed online are ads. And when I am watch­ing online videos, I have a ten­dency to skip over the unin­ter­est­ing “TV” com­mer­cials, if I can. Don’t you? That seri­ously dimin­ishes the impact of video adver­tis­ing if not done prop­erly and if you don’t find a way to engage the viewer. I try to advise our clients to choose to share some­thing that mat­ters to their audi­ence. Talk about some­thing that they want to know about and keep it short! Short videos can and do get the job done. Accord­ing to comScore’s find­ings, the aver­age online con­tent video was 5.2 min­utes. The ads aver­aged 0.4 min­utes (that’s only 24 seconds)!

As video adver­tis­ing moves for­ward, ana­lyt­ics are becom­ing more involved as well. Adver­tis­ers can find out not only how many peo­ple are view­ing their ads but whether they are male or female, where they are, how old they are, and even data about what web­sites they are view­ing, videos they are watch­ing, and more. This allows video adver­tis­ers to gauge the suc­cess of their cam­paigns like never before.

Adver­tis­ers are also able to tar­get their ads with much more spe­cific tar­get­ing tools. On YouTube, for instance, adver­tis­ers can tar­get cam­paigns to spe­cific viewer demo­graph­ics, spe­cific tags or cat­e­gories, and even to spe­cific videos. YouTube also recently added a fea­ture that allows adver­tis­ers to put age restric­tions on their videos to tar­get their audi­ences even more specif­i­cally. Now there is also Tube­Mogul, who allow you to buy tar­geted advert­ing. Tube­Mogul is “for mar­keters that want to influ­ence a consumer’s path to pur­chase or trial by cre­at­ing aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion and loy­alty, with­out giv­ing up account­abil­ity and measurability”.

As more and more tech­no­log­i­cal advances are made in web video, we are likely to see a huge increase in cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion in online video adver­tis­ing. I can’t wait to be a small part of that!