There is no doubt that 2011 has been a record-breaking year for social video.
So what does 2012 hold for online video?
Here are some predictions from Unruly Media's
'What's next for social video?' insight report...
1. Video culture: what will people be watching?
Memes will spring from unexpected places throughout 2012 as they have for years but, as always, momentous events will provide a springboard for meme culture.
The US Election and the Olympics will be meme playgrounds, and memes
are also likely to spring from End of the World predictions as December
21 approaches: it’s the end of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar which has been the centre of
speculation in certain circles.
Brands will be anticipating the memes, themes and Olympian dreams of
2012, creating video content around key events, and epic ads that use
storytelling to engage and build long-term connections with audiences,
as with the Heineken content of 2011.
People will be creating and watching more user/community-funded films
in 2012, with companies like Kickstarter providing independent film
makers with access to funding, and
video tools from YouTube and others boosting the quality of user generated content.
Brands will do more to encourage audience participation and
interaction both by using their audiences to create content via
competitions, and by introducing interactive functionality alongside
their video content.
Alongside epic, high quality content, fast/sticky/funny content will persist in video, and extend via GIFs.
Video and images are the key components of meme propagation online
and simple GIFs are likely to become fancier and spread more readily as a
midpoint between video and images.
GIFs behave as video shorthand and will become a more common form of
expression in 2012 thanks to free downloadable and web-based programmes
for GIF creation and opportunities to post GIFs on Tumblr, Google+ and
new GIF sites.
2. Device proliferation: where will people be watching?
While people will continue to consume social video on PC &
desktop computers, and while Connected TVs will gain traction,
significant and
increasing numbers of people will be watching social video on phone and tablet mobile devices.
Mobile is the fastest growing information & communications
technology ever seen (Figure 1) and mobile penetration will continue to
grow in 2012.
Figure 1
Source: ITU World Telecommunication / ICT Indicators database. *2011 data is estimated.
Developed economies
Cross-platform consumption of video content will become the norm, and
since sharing is intuitive on mobile devices, cross platform social
video will reach the mainstream.
A ‘best available device’ culture will emerge, which sees users
demanding the content they want, when they want it, on the best screen
they happen to have to hand at that moment.
This is already happening, and providers of content by subscription,
from the Financial Times to AppleTV are selling cross-platform
subscriptions to allow content to be pulled from the cloud onto multiple
devices.
This culture is likely to lead to the introduction of a ‘Continuous
Client’, a term coined by Joshua Topolsky of Engadget in 2010, which
describes full synchronicity between multiple devices so that the work
done on a phone, tablet or PC follows a user around as they switch to
other devices.
As Topolsky says: "your devices (and their clients) should talk to
each other so that you can placeshift your session from screen to
screen".
Figure 2 shows that ad campaigns that have been run across two
platforms perform better than those that have been run across a single
platform: with data like this and users consuming media across multiple
devices, brands will increase their cross platform ad spends
significantly in 2012.
As brand budgets follow the audiences to mobile, blending of brand
video delivery across online, mobile and TV platforms will become
commonplace.
Figure 2
Nielsen Cross Platform Behaviour, September 2011
Brands will also start embracing multi-screen consumption, engaging
with the companion screen to create content which is designed to
complement a TV-type viewing experience.
Users are already using the companion screen while watching TV, and
in 2012 more brands, particularly broadcasters, will come out with
companion content designed for smartphones and tablets.
Now that smartphones increasingly have 3D and Augmented Reality (AR)
delivery capabilities built in, there will be a jump in the amount of
commercially produced 3D and AR content in 2012, especially as 3DTV
proliferation increases.
Entertainment and top FMCG brands are likely to lead this charge.
Juniper Research predicts that AR mobile revenues will jump from $2m in
2010 to $1.5bn in 2015.
As new smartphones and tablets hit the market with increasingly
diverse features, from advanced camera technologies to temperature
sensors and barometers, new features are likely to become a springboard
for innovations from native application developers.
Developing and supporting native applications for multiple devices
and operating systems is time consuming and expensive. Brands have a
need for quality HTML5 functionality which allows them to support
features cross platform.
Emerging economies
Figure 3
Source: ITU World Telecommunication / ICT indicators database.
Developed / developing country classifications are based on the UN M49.
*2011 data is estimated.
Figure 3 shows that emerging markets are seeing a much faster and
wider adoption of mobile devices than of internet connected desktop and
laptop devices, and that increasing mobile subscriptions are impacting
the growth of web use(slightly but significantly) in those markets.
These trends result from the ability to access connectivity at a much
lower cost via mobile devices. For example, Aakash, a tablet device
launched in India, is being sold to students at the subsidised price of
$35, and are likely to continue in emerging economies over the coming
years.
Affordable mobile technology is becoming a work platform and a revenue generator for people in emerging economies.
For global advertisers, this means new markets are opening up:
direct-to-consumer channels are becoming available in territories
previously difficult to reach, such as India and Africa.
India’s current internet penetration stands at 6.6% of the population but is predicted to reach 29.5%, with the number of Indian smartphones set to top 450, by 2015 .
3. Social platforms: how will people be sharing?
As well as the ‘Big Four’ social platforms of 2012 (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+) social gaming environments will play a larger role in video sharing, as will the already powerful presences of region specific social platforms such as RenRen in China and VKontakte in Russia.
The advent of social video viewing platforms like Shelby.tv and VHX
may begin to change the way people discover, consume and share social
video content.
These platforms are designed to turn Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr
into TV channels, where you can discover and watch all of the videos
your friends are sharing and talking about in real time.
They facilitate a dedicated social video experience, and may be more widely used in 2012.
Facebook
Facebook is already becoming a gatekeeper, having introduced an
Advertiser Whitelist, Facebook Credits, and HTTPS support requirements
in 2011, and they will continue to control third party access,
introducing more third party requirements in 2012 and beyond.
On Facebook for the mobile web or iPad, if you tap on a story that a
friend has posted in your newsfeed relating to an app, Facebook will
fast-app-switch you over to the app if you already have it, or it will
deep link you to the app store to download the app if not.
This functionality tries to be device-appropriate: if you’re viewing
from an Android device, it will direct you to the Android app if
possible.
HTML5 apps are not mainstream, so it’s essential for Facebook to
fully support native applications. However, the current solution takes
users out of the site and out of Facebook’s control, so it is unlikely
to be a long term fix.
The leaked Project Spartan, a Facebook developer platform designed
for mobile apps in HTML5, may be released in 2012 as a longer term play
from the company as HTML5 becomes more developed and functional.
Twitter
Twitter will do more with
'Big Data'
in 2012. It introduced link shortening in June 2011, meaning that it
can now wrap all links shared in Twitter in the ‘t.co’ format to capture
data around how popular links are.
Twitter owns a lot of data around the number of clicks in a given
time period, and may use this real-time link tracking to introduce
real-time targeted ads.
YouTube
YouTube has introduced video tools to make video editing easier for
users, which are likely to increase the quality of the video content on
the site.
The trend towards live content and on-demand services on YouTube will
continue as Connected TV and TV on Demand blur the lines between TV and
online.
Also, there are likely to be more pay-per-view partnerships between
YouTube and broadcasters. For example, the Ultimate Fighting
Championship made all of the main card fights from UFC 135 available
live for fans in the U.S. on the UFC YouTube channel for $44.99.
Google+
Google+ is similar to Twitter and Facebook in many respects, but Hangouts are a differentiator.
Hangouts have the potential to become a hub for real-time socialised
co-viewing, perhaps particularly around video classes, and Google+ may
increase focus on social viewing via hangouts in 2012.
Social gaming
Social gaming will become even more mainstream in 2012. In the early
days of social gaming, the common perception of social gamers was that
they were all teens and tweens.
A little later, with the rise of Facebook games, the average social
gamer was a 43-year-old woman, and by 2011, the largest demographic was
25-34 males, with females not far behind (Figure 4).
By 2012, there will be 68.7m social gamers in the US, and already 92% of smartphone owners play mobile games weekly.
Within social gaming, value exchange advertising will be huge. Value
exchange allows brands to reward users for engaging with their content,
presenting a positive experience for users at the time that they choose
to interact, and freeing them from annoying ‘ads’ during gameplay.
Engaging with users when they are gaming allows advertisers to reach
users in their downtime when they have time to engage with content:
sharing it, clicking through for more information and commenting on it
if they find it interesting.
Figure 4 Figure 5
Popcap Research, September 2011, Mashable, March 2011
Local social platforms
While the Middle East and North Africa will be loyal to Facebook and YouTube, J-BRIC
(Japan,
Brazil, Russia, India and China) will continue to engage increasingly
with local video platforms and social networks, including Mixi in Japan,
VKontakte in Russia, and Orkut in Brazil and India.
China’s use of social platforms is increasing and the most popular
platforms tend to be homegrown, largely because Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, Google+ and many other platforms are banned in China.
Youku is the top Chinese video sharing site, Sina runs the biggest
blog and microblog community, and China’s various social networks are
illustrated in Figure 5.
Global brands will have to start tailoring social plans to make use
of these international social platforms, in order to have success around
the world.
4. Brands and video in 2012
Social video is emerging as the format of choice for planners and strategists with an eye on the long game.
The honeymoon for the 15-second pre-roll ad is coming to an end as
advertisers demand better execution and cut-through and move budgets
from push formats towards pull solutions; even pre-roll
is starting to morph into an interactive multi-choice medium.
The pioneering brands of 2012 will be looking to brands that have
created memes (like Old Spice with “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”),
have ridden memes very successfully (like Volkswagen with “The Force”),
or have created Epic Ad content that uses storytelling to engage
audiences (like Heineken with “The Entrance”) and strive to create
similarly resonant content: online video creatives will see higher
production and distribution budgets.
As brands spend more time and money on social video, the analytics and insight they need to see around this content will become more and more important.
Brands will be looking for insight into exactly who is watching and
sharing their videos, including demographics, real time brand uplift
metrics; and benchmarking by category.
Understanding the true sentiment
behind comments at
scale will also become increasingly important for advertisers as more
users engage and interact with branded content.
Social video bridges the gap between content consumption and ad spend.
Social video campaigns generated 820m views in 2009, 2.7bn views in 2010, and over 8bn views in 2011. We are likely to see the number of views delivered from social video campaigns more than double again in 2012. - David Waterhouse, eConsultancy
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