By Tod Sacerdoti
July 29, 2008
Convincing clients to use online video involves three key elements: sharing key facts, making specific recommendations and backing all initial video efforts with a strong research effort.
Key Facts
Clients are aware of online video, but they generally don’t realize the growth, scale or performance facts.
1. Video is Bigger Than Search: 12 billion videos are watched per month vs. 10.5 billion searches conducted.
2. Video Consumption is Quickly Moving Online: 19% of total video consumption is now online, versus 11% a year ago.
3. Most Users Consume Video: 80% of Internet users watch video, moving to 88% by 2012.
4. Consumption is High Across All Demos: 76% of children and 44% of seniors watched online video.
5. Video Is Fastest Growing Ad Category: Video advertising will growth 45% this year vs. 37% for social media.
6. TV Scale is Accessible Online: Many vendors now represent unique and volume numbers that are larger than prime-time TV.
7. Video is Highest Performing Unit Online: Pre-roll video outperforms all traditional display units on brand lift, brand recall and lift in purchase intent.
To see the full article, visit AdAge’s Web Video Report.
Yesterday I wrote a post on AdAge on “How to Spot Fake Pre-Roll,” as we have noticed a trend of online publishers and networks packaging low quality ad units as pre-roll. The article goes into detail about what to look out for and what questions you should ask to verify your pre-roll buys.
Here are the highlights:
Pre-Roll Quality Categories
1. Gold Standard: Traditional Pre-Roll, as defined above
2. High Quality: Video ads that play in the middle of long form content (such as an ad between segments of House on Hulu.com)
3. Medium Quality: Video ads that auto-start with sound in a publisher’s video section; no user initiation
4. Low Quality: Video ads that auto-start with sound on a publisher’s home page; no user initiation or attention
5. Questionable Quality: Video ads that auto-start without sound in display inventory (typically by an ad network without video technology)
6. Borderline Fraudulent: Video ads that auto-start without sound on a publisher’s video player which can be embedded by users anywhere
Key Queries to insure 100% Pre-Roll:
1. Will my video ads ever be played in the middle of content, as opposed to before content?
2. Will my video ads ever be served into an environment where video is not the main content on the page?
3. Will my video ads ever be auto-started, i.e. started without a user initiation?
4. Will my video ads ever be started with the sound off?
5. Will my video ads ever be served into display inventory?
6. Will my video ads be served into any syndicated content? (Syndication almost always means a reduction in quality.)
7. Can you provide me with a list of every URL my ads will appear on?
I recently sat on a panel where a big topic of discussion was: Can we reach television-sized audiences using online video? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. However, it became clear that most digital media buyers do not think about the world in terms of television size audiences — and most television media buyers only speak the language of television.
Today, MediaPost’s VideoInsider posted an article I wrote about this issue and some thoughts on how to address it. Click here for the VideoInsider article.