Three Ways To Take Better Control Of Online Video Advertising
We’ve heard the quote recycled by plenty from our good ole’ buddies at HubSpot: “…by 2013, 90% of internet traffic to is expected to be video.” And yet, here we stand in 2013 – and are we really that surprised? Nope.
Take a look at the golden boy of online video, YouTube. Seventy-two hours of video uploaded every minute. Over 800 million separate eyes on the prize each month. More than a trillion views in 2011? Woah there, cowboy. Good work, YouTubers.
But for the majority of brands and agencies, the nut of online video is still to be cracked. The Guardian said back in 2009, “…Prohibitive costs and a lack of accurate metrics have stopped advertisers from diving into online video. But this is about to change.”
Fast-forward three years, and it would seem that Mystic Meg is yet to rear her head. The kicker? A recent study from Kantar Media revealed that out of 4100 brands’ advertisements, a mere 23% were leveraging any type of online video – the remaining 77% choosing to drop their budgets exclusively on national TV advertising.
So what’s the deal? In a recent MeetTheBoss Roundtable with the likes of Jonathan Earle, CMO, Slovakia, Telefonica; Celia Pronto, Marketing & Ecommerce Director at Ford Retail; and Felipe Del Corral, Global Head of Digital Retail at Nokia – to name but a few – the discussion turned towards finding out.
On its coat tails, here are three ways brands and agencies can alter the online video landscape to reap the rewards of leveraged online video advertising – and it’s not all about YouTube.
Lauren Fisher, Co-Founder of social media and online PR agency, Simply Zesty, made an invaluable point on the roundtable:
“…there are metrics in TV that brands trust and they’ve built on over years. Online can’t compete with those decades of learning that TV advertising can; but I think it’s also susceptible to the fact that there are endless metrics that you can report on [online]. You can look at what time people started watching; how long they watched for; and when they clicked off. There’s so many metrics that there’s then this assumption that if you’ve got ‘it all’ then you can tell us ‘this’. And you can’t, really.”
And herein lies the point. Spending money on online video advertising isn’t as simple as pushing the live button on your content and watching products fly out of shops. Neither is that the case for TV. But the difference resides in finding the right metrics to report on – and trusting them.
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of advertising powerhouse Ogilvy, offered in a MeetTheBoss interview: “…there are very few decisions consumers make that are based on a single value metric. [Advertisers] recognise that there’s a complex trade-off to be made before consumers will buy anything.
“Generally, what digital and mobile media do very well aren’t measured by attention metrics. In other words, ‘how many eyeballs did I reach for every £1000 I spent’ doesn’t factor in things like engagement. It doesn’t factor in that a ‘pure’ and self-selecting audience is more valuable than a random audience you pick yourself. And it doesn’t factor in virality.”
So what metrics could work? Sutherland offered a few in “timely…immediacy…and contextual relevance,” but for the time being, it’s entirely subjective – what works for one campaign might be immeasurable for another. If you’re a brand, work with your agency and find a balance that works for the both of you. If you’re an agency, relay to the client what expectations are likely to be met and why.
Fisher made another astute point that doesn’t seem to be being pushed as hard as it should. Brands, listen up: online video shouldn’t be coming out of your TV budgets. Bar the fact that both live in the world of moving pictures, they are not one and the same.
The world of connected devices has forever changed consumer TV habits. Yes, that 52-inch TV might still be blaring out the latest episode of The Simpsons or Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but audiences are buried deep in their tablets/smartphones/laptops as soon as the adverts come on. Apple TV (and countless others waiting in the wings) allows iOS users to flick online content – legal or otherwise – from their apple devices straight onto the TV. And what about the emergence of our second screen experiences?
Placing TV and online video would be akin to linking .mp3’s with CDs – and we all know the direction the music industry’s taking; it’s a no-brainer that they should be kept separate when it comes to budget. But where you get that budget from depends entirely on the structure of your overall marketing budget and how much you’re willing to risk to experiment.
Are you using online video as part of an integrated marketing strategy? Then you’re probably already taking money from the right pot. Just dipping your toe in the waters of experimentation? Then chances are that budget will be coming from the ‘take a punt 10%’ slice of your marketing pie. The bottom line: raise a code for online video and attribute it thus.
Carrying on the conversation, Fisher went on to offer that a slight frustration of hers, centered around the fact that her agency would approach online video from a creative point of view, with the aim of producing content that spreads online and via word of mouth, “…and yet there’s a slight disjoint; we’re not the ad agency, so we don’t necessarily place that content.
“What I’m starting to see with video advertising at the moment is that it’s an extension of an existing TV advert, as opposed to video that’s made for online. Where you do get video that’s made for online, it’s from a content organic point of view. There needs to be a shift.”
Indeed there does. Take YouTube’s pre-roll ads. How many times have you pressed ‘skip ad’ as soon as the five-second countdown has done its job in the bottom right-hand corner? And how many times have you watched the ad in its entirely? The irony isn’t lost here – especially when you’re skipping through a £50,000 piece of content to watch a cat play a keyboard.
And yet brands and their agencies seem to be getting, as Fisher would put it, ‘greedy’. YouTube offers them a 30-second pre-roll spot, so they’ll take the entire 30 seconds. Why? They’re expensive to produce, often regurgitate ill-fitting TV spots and gain very little attention.
Instead, brands should be testing out how to disrupt the norm and engage audiences. Take the risk of producing 5-10 second pre-roll ads. Get creative. Work on the terms of the consumer first. Because if you don’t, you’re missing the point entirely.
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Adam has interviewed over 450 chief executives from Adidas to Zappos. He has spoken on communication, leadership, and innovation at several major conferences, for organisations as diverse as CA and CeBIT, and is Master of Ceremonies for a number of brilliant business events.