Is it time to go big on Video Advertising?

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Blog Authors:

Vaibhav Chachra - Associate Account Manager, Advertising Cloud

Manu Malhotra - Associate Manager, Advertising Cloud Services

With majority of the online activity centered around viewing videos, #VideoAdvertising has become imperative for overall marketing effectiveness. 

What offers an edge to video advertising is the fact that videos capture audience’s attention and are way more engaging than text/display ads as they establish an emotional connect through sound and visual delivery. In addition, if the video is personalized, it leads to a great user experience.

Factors behind rise of Video Advertising

With the ease of access and increase in internet speeds across the globe, the digital users are increasingly switching to Mobile devices and consuming video content. Per eMarketer, 1.87 billion users globally are likely to use a mobile device to view digital video content this year – around 12% spike from 2017. Isn’t that whopping?

Some emerging trends

Video advertising is an ever-evolving space and we as digital marketers should ensure that we adapt to the constant changes in the mobile and app environments and utilize the new ad formats.

• For instance, we can see how vertical video content has started gaining traction in recent times as it delivers much easier viewing experience. In addition, it is in line with how majority of users hold a smartphone. To add to that, Forbes too stated to have experienced around 15-25% higher click-to-play rate on a vertical video format over horizontal traditional videos.
• We can also see shorter and more impactful video ads emerging recently to cater to the limited attention span of users such as the skippable YouTube ads and Snapchat looking to implement mandatory 3-second viewing. With rapid scroll behavior of users on mobile devices, Brands have only a short window to capture viewers’ attention. That said, the shorter video ads with instant branding are likely to take over the longer TV commercial-style video ads in the long run.
• The platforms of distribution for video content online have shifted drastically over the last 18 months. Facebook is getting more daily minutes watched than YouTube and is becoming TV’s competitor these days, Snapchat’s daily views are now in the billions, and video on Twitter has taken listening and one to one advertising to a next level.
• While video viewing is on the rise, brand safety has become a bigger concern than ever before. Use of machine learning algorithms and human intervention is picking up as monitoring video content becomes more and more critical. Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have taken up brand safety interventions aggressively, recently.

Challenges that need to be addressed

• Plethora of different formats, devices and platforms make it difficult to measure the RoI for mobile video campaigns. The challenge aggravates when third party cookies don’t work in many apps and apple’s safari mobile browser turns them off.
• Reusing :15 & :30 sec video ads over mobile continues to be a failing strategy. The industry is rather slowly moving to creative story optimized for mobile.
• Lack of common standards across the industry for measuring key KPIs such as viewability, results in data discrepancy across reports by different vendors.
• Fraud continues to haunt advertisers and publishers. According to Iab reports mobile fraud markets is reasonably immature right now, however it might significantly rise in near future.

Time to invest more in Video Advertising

Despite the challenges, digital video advertising is growing faster than ever before. According to iab reports, mobile video is one of the greatest contributors to overall video advertising growth. While pre-roll ad format continues to be critical and effective, mid-rolls are on the rise too. Where mid-rolls score over the pre-rolls are the higher completion rates. Looking at demographics, people across all ages are engaging with video content, millennials though continue to be one of the biggest consumers of video content.

If these facts aren’t compelling enough for you to invest in video, another big reason to motivate you is YOUR COMPETITION who is already capturing attention of your potential customers through video ads. Now that is something you just can’t afford to ignore, isn’t it?