SmartMarket Media Blog

According to a new survey by PermissionTV and reported on eMarketer, Marketers will increase their use of online video in 2009 (read their full article here). Here are some of the interesting statistics and trends they are predicting from this survey:

In the online survey of 400 senior marketing executives, nearly 2/3 identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.  More than half are planning the launch of an online video campaign by the second quarter of 2009.

Brand awareness was listed by 71% of survey respondents as the biggest value of online video, followed by lead generation (47%), customer retention (44%), and customer conversion (41%).

Interesting to me was that e-mail was missing from the ad tactics respondents were asked about. Matt Kaplan, vice president at PermissionTV, told eMarketer that survey participants were not asked specifically about their e-mail budget plans. Although I believe e-mail marketing is a standard tactic for nearly all digital marketing campaigns and is especially effective when deploying an online video campaign. Who better to deploy an online video to and ask to forward it on to friends that a permission based e-mail list of contacts you already have a relationship with? The reason it was omitted was because spending on e-mail is far lower than for many other formats.This does make sense as E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) services are relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of an online marketing campaign.

It will be interesting to see how 2009 pans out according to these predictions. It’s refreshing to see that brand awareness was the top reason for doing an online video marketing campaign as that is one of the strengths of online video. Those who put down lead generation, customer retention, and customer conversion will hopefully have some sort of statistics aggregation tracking in place as well as some sort of call-to-action either built into the video or somewhere around the video as this is critical to the success of any online video campaign.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How much of a typical online video is actually watched?