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Posts Tagged ‘online ads’

Online video on the rise Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

One of the topics getting an increasing amount of airplay is online video. It’s growth is bucking the downward spend pattern of most other forms of media. Here are just a few of the articles worth reading on this trend:

  • Is the Big Shift Underway? Talks about how relatively high CPMs compared with television to grab large audiences has been holding back the growth of online video. One of the comments on the story says, “We think there is another business model emerging for brands leveraging video on the Web: Brands hosting video content on their own site instead of running ads around someone else’s video at an aggregated site. Our vision is that brands will soon realize that a person watching video content on a brand’s website are easily worth 20 times the value of a viewer offsite watching an ad. We think a new metric will soon be developed. And it will define the ROI of brands creating their own engaging, fun content on their own websites that visitors want to see.”
  • Online Video Changes Game for Brand Marketers: “Video has expanded well beyond the media industry and into nearly every corner of the professional Web, as corporations, governments, non-profits and educational institutions look to use video as a cornerstone of how they communicate, market and inform on the Web.” Has some good case studies on the effective use of online video.
  • Online Video Subtitles (Duh!): Predicts that spending on online video advertising will grow by more than 50% a year for the next five years to more than US$5.8 billion by 2013. Cites research showing that adding subtitles to videos increased time spent viewing by more than 40 per cent.

Will be interesting to, um, watch what happens in Australia in this part of the online market.


Shirt-folding beats political history Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Attended the Thoughtworks Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney yesterday, where the heads of News Digital Media (Sue Klose) and Fairfax Digital (Pippa Leary) outlined developments in online media in Australia, and picked up some interesting facts about Australian online media consumption:

  • There are two spikes in visits to online news sites - at the beginning of the workday, when people check the news headlines; and at lunchtime, when they eat lunch at their desk and go for more entertainment info and videos
  • 35,000 people watched the live stream of Barack Obama’s victory speech on Fairfax Digital. That same day, a video on the site about how to fold a shirt was viewed by 39,000 people
  • Fairfax is claiming 2 million unique user per month just to its business and finance content, with 25-30 average page impressions per user
  • Online video advertising is expected to reach US$2.9 billion in the US in 2009 - 13% of the online advertising total - but the figures for Australia are expected to be only a fraction of that

Australian online ad measurement study underway Friday, October 24th, 2008

From today’s B&T newsletter: “Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia has partnered with the major five online publishers to launch a major study into the effectiveness of internet advertising.

“The publishers - Fairfax Digital, News Digital Media, Ninemsn, MediaSmart and Yahoo!7 – have each provided equal online inventory in a standard IAB ad format to create an ‘average’ online brand building
campaign.

“The ads, for an FMCG client, have been provided free of charge and will provide an insight into the impact of online advertising.

“The IAB refused to name the brand involved or the media agency handling the placements, citing the need for unaffected results. Nielsen Online is managing the project and will compile the final analysis of the study.

“Results of the five-week project, which is described as ‘unheralded’ by the IAB, will be released on 26 November.”

Read the whole story here.


‘Engaged’ video viewers open to brand messages Friday, October 24th, 2008

Forrester Consulting’s online video engagement report , conducted for online video company Veoh, reveals that while some online video viewers still only “snack” on short clips, there is a growing audience of “young, influential, engaged viewers who watch a great deal of long-form online video and pay attention to the brand messages delivered to them in online video environments.”

As Veoh reports: “The study found that Engaged Viewers (viewers who watch more than an hour of online video a week) make up nearly 40% of all online video viewers and watch nearly 75% of all online video. Of these Engaged Viewers, those who spend the most time consuming and sharing long-form content:

  • Are more likely to watch videos all the way through
  • Pay more attention to online video more than they do TV
  • Interact with and rate the videos they watch more frequently
  • Are twice as likely to recall in-video ads and post-rolls than non-Engaged Viewers
  • Agree more readily that advertising is fair and helps pay for their free experience
  • Consider banner ads and ads that come in between videos (mid-rolls) most effective”

The takeaway? Veoh concludes that, “As online video viewing matures, advertisers can take advantage of the unique opportunity to reach valuable Engaged Viewers by starting with the following:

  1. Think Advertainment, not Advertisement. Engaged video viewers are more open to enjoying the advertising they watch giving marketers an opportunity to create ads that are as entertaining as the video clips they are paired with. Make the advertising a part of this engaging environment by telling compelling stories rather than consistently repeating the same 30-second spot.
  2. Active mindset = greater action…. Consider having multiple creative units depending on the mindset and propensity to engage with the medium.
  3. Think about all the ad units on the page as a team. All viewers feel advertising can be annoying. But none of them said it had to be annoying. Engaged viewers respond to ad formats that don’t intrude unfairly. Their preference for banner ads supports this. But banner ads can be supported by a comprehensive ad experience that ties display ads, sponsorships, and in-video ads together into a coherent package.
  4. Target it and they will come. As more viewers spend more than an hour a week viewing online video, it’s time for advertisers and the sites that enable them to start matching ads to viewers more intelligently. The easiest place to do this is with long-form content, where the choice of programming - an episode of one’s favorite tv show - says more about a viewer than a short clip about a dog on a skateboard ever can.”

Online shows, short-form video for Fairfax Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

From the B and T newsletter:
“Fairfax Media is diversifying its advertising opportunities through the development of new types of short-form video content on its websites, and has commissioned several new online shows.

“The new internet TV shows include several ‘infotainment’ broadcasts and branded content shows including Land Rover’s Best Breaks, a 12-part series looking at short breaks from Sydney and Melbourne.

“An increased demand, particularly around lunch time, from viewers has led to a new ‘primetime’ audience for advertisers to tap into, said Pippa Leary, managing director of media for Fairfax Digital.

“’Short-form videos offer more freedom to viewers- because it’s on demand and easy to share with others,’ she said.

“….Fairfax is closely monitoring what is happening in the US and the UK in the branded content area, said Leary. ‘As audiences get more sophisticated the advertisers have to get more sophisticated, too.’

She said one of the major trends Fairfax have noticed is advertising agencies creating both TV ads and online ads when doing a shoot: ‘The ads for online are a lot shorter and also incorporate more interactivity.’

“The media company’s latest show was a comedy sketch called 51st State by performer and writer Dan Ilic, which covered the Democratic Convention in the US. ‘Because it was topical at the time, the series blurred the lines between news and entertainment. It appeals to a broad audience and also advertisers trying to reach a diverse audience,’ said Leary.”