Why Video Marketing Adoption Continues To Grow [survey]

More than 80% of marketers use videos on their own websites

In recent years, the costs of video production have dropped tremendously thanks to digital technology, while the barriers to distributing video content have also fallen, owing to the internet. Those two factors have likely hastened the adoption of video marketing, which is now near-ubiquitous among US senior marketing professionals, according to a survey conducted during Q2 2013 and Q3 2013 by the Web Video Marketing Council, ReelSEO and Flimp Media.

The poll found that 93% of marketers had used video for online marketing, sales or communications purposes at some point during 2013, up from 81% in 2012. Another 3% said they had not used video in 2013 but were considering doing so.



The growing importance of digital video marketing is also reflected in the number of dollars marketing professionals are allocating to the channel. The poll found that 70.5% of respondents expected their outlays for video to increase in 2013 over the previous year, while 14.6% indicated that budgets would remain static. Just 1.3% foresaw a drop in video marketing budgets for the year.



Marketers are also taking advantage of a number of content delivery platforms in order to get their videos in front of an audience. While the website was the most popular destination for video content, used by nearly 84% of respondents, almost two-thirds tapped YouTube to post videos. Social media platforms were employed by close to 62% of respondents, while around 60% of those polled sent videos via email.



The report also found that user-generated videos were contributing to the increasing number of overall videos produced and disseminated on sharing sites and social media platforms. But it concluded that these types of videos were less effective as marketing tools than professionally produced videos with higher production values.

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Why Red Bull, Victoria’s Secret and BlendTec Are Getting Video Content Right

Producing content on a regular basis helps brands succeed with earned media.

It's wise to also invest in content that has a strong storytelling component.The key to winning on YouTube with earned media is a mixture of quality and quantity. A mix of paid, earned and owned media is what makes a brand efficient on YouTube YouTube's New Mobile Ad Unit
This week YouTube rolled out a new mobile version of its homepage takeover ad, which is a popular ad spot on desktop.

The ads appear as a regular video at the top of the page within the “What to Watch” section in YouTube’s apps. With 40 percent of traffic coming from mobile, Google is looking to help monetize some of its content with more compelling advertising units than banner advertisements.

As marketers look to move away from banner ads, YouTube’s new mobile ad unit also points to the rise in native forms of advertising that publishers are embracing to reach consumers through their mobile devices where they are spending a substantial amount of time watching videos.

These new paid ads give marketers guaranteed reach, but could also be easily be skimmed over as consumers scroll through videos.

YouTube also offers mobile pre-roll video ad placements that play before content. However, consumers have become accustomed to skipping these kinds of ads.

Brands need to focus on creating entertaining, intriguing, and useful content aligned to the audience's interests. Then distribute that content across all channels.

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Brands Up Video Ad Budgets by 65%

Following customers as they wander off from their television sets, big brand advertisers are starting to divert TV ad budgets to online video–or at least they intend to.

That’s one of the most interesting findings in video ad exchange Adap.TV’s semiannual “State of the Video Industry” report conducted with the digital media site Digiday. Of course, it would be fair to assume that Adap.TV, which was acquired by AOL in August for $405 million and recently helped AOL AOL -3.34% unseat Google GOOG -1.45% as the biggest seller of video ads online, would be seeing trends like this perhaps more than a disinterested party. But it polled some 900 ad agencies, advertisers, ad networks, and publishers, so it’s worth paying attention to.

Not surprisingly, the study found that video ads are exploding, thanks in part to automated technologies to make the buying process faster and easier as well as a jump in the amount of live and on-demand content coming to all screens. This year, brands upped their video ad budgets by 65% from 2012. Some 86% of brands and 91% of agencies expect to spend more on them next year.

The study found that 31% of brands see video ad budgets coming from broadcast TV, 13% from cable TV. Display, which to date has been the main target and may well continue to be for years to come, was cited by 30% of brands. “People aren’t watching reliably in front of their TV screens anymore,” instead watching on multiple screens, Adap.TV Chief Marketing Officer Kara Weber said in an interview. “It’s shifting how brands are looking to reach consumers.”

Throw agencies, which constitute the largest segment polled at 43% of respondents, into the mix with brands, and the percentages change considerably. So it’s probably risky to extrapolate the results of this study to actual budgets shifts. Some 21% of agencies and brands together see budgets coming from broadcast, 11% citing cable. Instead, brands agencies overall saw big increases in budgets coming from out-of-home advertising such as billboards and search advertising. Brands see very little shift to online video coming from search because they view search ads as a good way to drive more people to their online video.

Only 3% of brands and agencies taken together cited display, which seems odd. However, Weber said that’s likely the result of agencies still being organized with separate TV and digital operations, so budgets don’t flow freely between the operations.

All that said, Adap.TV cautions that any change won’t be large or quick:

Looking still more closely at how much broadcast budgets could shift in the coming year, it’s important to note that this year 42 percent of all video advertising buyers said there had been no change in their broadcast spending whatsoever. So, while they say a change is likely in 2014, it may not necessarily come to fruition. Furthermore, the largest group of buyers says the decline was 10 percent or less of their broadcast budgets. These numbers will continue to fluctuate as buyers examine their efforts in TV, digital and mobile video, and how that translates into a media mix that adapts with the rapidly converging nature of those worlds.

Another big trend is the way these video ads are bought–via automated buying known as programmatic. “In just the past two years, brand patronage of programmatic video channels such as exchanges and DSPs has roughly doubled, as direct to publisher purchases have declined by 15 percent,” the report says. A lot more advertisers and agencies are also buying mobile ads than they were three years ago.

But there remains at least one big obstacle to the movement of TV ad budgets to online video: a lack of universal metrics for determining how the reach, targeting, and performance of video ads. “Audience guarantees online were expected to be a game-changer for the ‘TV-ization’ of online video,” the study says. “Yet some 65 percent of brands and 70 percent of agencies say that existing measurement standards do not satisfy their need for audience guarantees.” - Robert Hof, Forbes

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Most Online Video Views - Less Than 5 Minutes in Length

Most consumers are keeping it short and sweet when it comes to their online video viewing habits, but that may be limiting the industry’s ability to monetize its inventory, according to FreeWheel’s Q1 Video Monetization Report. During the first quarter, 86.7% of video views on “Linear + Digital” networks were less than 5 minutes in length, as were 86.2% of video views on “Digital Pure-Play” networks. But ad loads (ads per video viewed) for short-form content averaged out at just 0.9 for the Linear + Digital model and 0.5 for the Digital Pure-Play model.

By contrast, ad loads were a healthy 9.5 in Q1 for long-form content served up by FreeWheel’s Linear + Digital clients, although they were much smaller (1.3) for Digital Pure-Plays. Long-form content (20+ minutes) accounted for 6% of views for Linear + Digital, and only 1.9% for Digital Pure-Plays.

The researchers describe the “Linear + Digital” model as generating the “majority of… revenue from linear TV services and also offering content on IP-based environment,” as well as “being “focused on diverse mix of short, mid, and long-form content, with an emphasis on driving high ad loads.” The “Digital Pure-Play” model, by contrast, is characterized by its exclusive operation in IP-based environments, “either by aggregating third-party premium content and/or developing original premium content.” In this case, the “business models [are] focused on video view growth through syndicated distribution of largely short-form content.”

When all of that is boiled down, the result is that the Linear + Digital model is seeing a slight decline in total video views (down 8% year-over-year), but that its much higher ad loads result in somewhat equal ad views as the Digital Pure-Play model, which has generated scale (+47% year-over-year) in video views, but lacks the ad loads of its counterpart. Those results may not change in the near future: most of the Digital Pure-Play’s growth has been in short-form video (+54% year-over-year), while the Linear + Digital model only managed 4% growth in long-form video views.

The researchers note that a combination of these models is necessary in order to bring online video to TV’s scale and to address the increasing demand from traditional TV ad buyers. That includes optimizing the mix of short, mid, and long-form content, increasing ad loads, and building audience size.

Other Findings:

• On a net basis across both business models, total video views increased by 30% year-over-year in Q1.
• The Digital Pure-Play model is heavily dependent on syndication, which accounted for 84% of video views in Q1, compared to 25% for the Linear + Digital model.
• 96% of ad views for Digital Pure-Play networks were pre-rolls in Q1, while for Linear + Digital, mid-rolls accounted for 41% of ad views, up from 36% a year earlier.

About the Data: The data in the report is one of the largest available on the usage and monetization of professional, rights-managed video content, and in 2012 comprised over 53 billion video views.-MarketingCharts

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