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Posts Tagged advertising
Making online video work harder.
Posted by vaughan in creative, technology providers on November 26, 2009
Matt Kaplan recently posted on Mediapost about the importance of making video advertising work for the web. It is an excellent post and one that many advertisers and agencies should consider before setting out the goals of their campaigns. The advertising equivalent of a 12″ remix is the 1min 15 secs version of an ad that was destined for a 30 second slot on TV. Just because you can post a longer version doesn’t necessarily mean that you should and remember that this is online so people are a click away from being elsewhere.
The creative possibilities within a video are bountiful. From the intrusive ‘CLICK ME I’M SOMETHING DIFFERENT’ to the more subtle ‘you seem to be enjoying watching so why don’t you find out more about me’. The tools are widely available to make a video interactive so it seems like now would be a pretty good time for advertisers and agencies to start using them. One important point that I think Matt misses is that a user who is watching a video ad online will almost always have a mouse in their hand and the advertiser needs to think about whether they want the user to use it or not. Interactivity doesn’t make sense in every situation but where there is an opportunity to pass an engaged user on to the point of purchase then why not let them? If someone is giving you their time to watch an ad on YouTube then they are already a pretty engaged user, why make them go elsewhere to look for the product or service that you want them to find.
This is a picture diary of me growing a moustache for Movember. If I hadn’t included the link to donate within the video then people would have to look elsewhere, email me, go to my Facebook page or hunt me out any other way to find the link. By making the clicking and the donating as easy as possible I think that my video has more value. My donations have gone up as a result of it certainly and that was the KPI that I set out ahead of time so for me this has been a success. It may be time for advertisers to move on from thinking that 10,000 views on YouTube is enough of a success, after all – that’s just TV on a computer.
| Find more reactive videos at coull.com |
Dear ITV.com, have you heard of frequency capping?
Online catch up services have gained in popularity for TV stations ever since the launch of the BBC iplayer. Now we have the ITV Player, the Sky Player, Channel 4 OnDemand and Demand Five. The BBC is currently only available inside the UK and therefore doesn’t carry any advertising. The others include pre-roll advertising with companion banners, the quality of their implementations varies however.
Channel 5 show a few ads before the content with regular (and rather well signposted) break throughout the show. The ads are varied and clickable to go through and find out more about the advertised products. Channel 4 loses the signposting but allows click-throughs and varies the ads, and both of these come with some form of companion banner ad.
Now – to get to the point of the post – if you are a fan of Le Tour de France then you will probably have been watching the nightly round up of the day’s activities. I had missed a few and decided to dedicate some time to catching up with a few on ITV.com, almost the perfect use case for catch up TV. After starting the first episode and seeing an ad for G-Force (FBI employs wise cracking guinea pigs to prevent terror plot) the program played. At the next ad break the same ad played, at the next ad break the same ad played……..ad infinitum.
Reach and frequency are important to advertisers, the right balance of both yields the best results. If however the frequency is too great (I saw the G-force ad 15 times in a day) and the reach is too narrow, after all how many cycling fans have been watching it on the ITV website, then the experience is pretty poor which leads to poor results. I am not the target audience for the film, but had I been then I probably would have been turned off by the ads, a negative result for Disney. It wasn’t even clickable!
Most ad-servers worth their salt enable frequency capping, either ITV need to learn how to use it or they should seriously think about limiting the ad spots in their TV shows when played online.
