Marketing Eye on Online Video for 2009
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.
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How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?
One of the frustrating things about online video view counting is YouTube and most other video sites count a “view” regardless of how much of a video is actually watched. So that got the research staff at TubeMogul thinking…how much are people actually watching before they click away?
The results from their study are pretty amazing: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video. All going back to the point I try to stress with every one of my clients that brevity is key. Click the image to see an enlarged graph of TubeMogul’s study findings.
For the full report from TubeMogul Industry Analysis, continue reading here. Here are some of the highlighted statistics that I found truly interesting:
Most videos steadily lose viewers once “play” is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.
I found this one surprising but not a complete shock. Most of our online marketing videos fall under 1½ minutes. The fact that over half of all viewers they sampled drop off after the first minute is interesting. How many were because the videos were incorrectly described or tagged and how many were just “casual browsers” checking out videos randomly. Properly titling, describing and tagging your video is one of the most important steps to getting found by the right people who are more likely part of that 46.44%. If they were looking for your content, they are far more likely to watch it to completion…as long as you keep it short.
A three minute video that has a post-roll ad in the final seconds, for example, will only be viewed by 16.62% of the initial audience, on average.Another takeaway is that overlay ads should be displayed as early as possible in a video, preferably within the first few seconds. On YouTube, where most overlay ads appear at about 10 seconds in, 10.39% of a video’s initial viewers are not likely seeing the ad.
Alright I’m going to go off on a little tangent here – I am not a fan of pre-roll or post-roll ads on video content. Personally I just think it is too much of an interruption to the viewer who clicked on a particular video to watch…NOT the advertisement tacked onto the video. I wonder how many viewers are clicking away because they are annoyed by the interruption of overlay ads on the video they are trying to watch? Especially if it is interfering with the content. Social networking on video sharing sites is all about inbound marketing or letting the community find the resources they are looking for by properly tagging videos with the keywords they will be searching for. Overlay ads to me are more of the old school of outbound marketing like television commercials, print ads, etc. a shotgun approach to hit as many people as possible with their sales pitch without regard as to whether it is hitting their target market or not. Sorry…my diatribe is over now. Anyway if you are going to engage on overlay advertising, this is a staggering reason why you shouldn’t even consider post-roll overlay advertising.
TubeMogul has once again impressed me with their industry leading research and produced some impressive results from their study. What about your own viewing habits? How long do you typically watch a video? How do you feel about overlay ads?
8 comments5 Question Interview: David Burch from TubeMogul
Anyone who has talked to me recently about online video distribution knows I have been singing the praises of TubeMogul. Founded in 2006 by online video buffs who met while in graduate school, TubeMogul’s objective from the start has been to empower online video producers, advertisers and the online video industry by providing publishing tools and insightful, easy to interpret analytics.
With TubeMogul, users upload videos once and TubeMogul deploys them to as many of the top video sharing sites the producer chooses. TubeMogul’s integrated analytics then provide a single source of metrics on where, when, and how often the videos are viewed. Best of all, this service is FREE.
As part of my love of TubeMogul’s services I contacted them to see if I could interview someone for my blog. David Burch, the Marketing Manager for TubeMogul, kindly obliged.
David Burch is 25 years old and studied at Berkeley, where he currently resides and where TubeMogul is based. His previous job was as Content Manager for an e-commerce startup in San Francisco. After briefly attending law school, he found his way to TubeMogul, where he currently heads up their marketing efforts.
The previous night someone in his neighborhood in Berkeley was singing songs in French at the top of their lungs which kept David up for most of the night. After I promised not to break into “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” during the interview…we got down to business and commenced:
Eric Guerin: So David, how was TubeMogul able to partner with so many video sharing sites to provide a solution to video deployment and especially aggregate video viewing statistics?
David Burch: Video sites are eager to make life easier for their users, and we help do that with our free distribution and analytics tools. While our CEO has the “biz dev chops,” it is our 30,000 passionate users, from CBS Interactive and Next New Networks on down to vloggers and struggling filmmakers, that are truly responsible for making these deals happen by putting out high-quality content that these video sites want to sell advertising around.
EG: How are you able to offer such a robust product for free?
DB: While there are over 30,000 free users of TubeMogul mainly made up of vloggers and small independent video production studios, our business is able to “keep the lights on” because of clients such as CBS Interactive, Michael Eisner’s new media production company, Vuguru, Next New Networks and several agencies representing the top brands in media technology and consumer products. These clients require more robust services such as BuzzTracker which allows companies to track buzz in the user generated content world or compare their brand versus their competitors by tracking videos and viewership across the internet based upon selected keywords. We even assist some of these companies by managing viral marketing campaigns and hiring production studios to create “response videos” to increase their brand recognition.
EG: TubeMogul’s industry analysis and reports are incredibly in depth and helpful to any video publisher looking to gain more information about various video sharing sites, what constitutes a view, etc. What led TubeMogul to become so forward thinking regarding this research and analysis?
DB: Thanks! Having deployed over 800,000 videos, we have a wealth of data on online video viewership and are trying to share it with the world. Since we sell the graph and not a particular video player or advertiser, our only agenda is truth.
EG: One big thing I know a lot of online video producers would find beneficial is being able to track if people watch the video to completion or the overall length of time they watched the video. Dealing with so many different video sharing sites, will this be a possibility in the near future?
DB: Getting in-player statistics like that is something we are working on, both in terms of the engineering and in getting the deals with sites. Many video sites are understandably cautious about letting us that deep into their code, but several are coming around and we expect the rest to follow, given the power of these statistics. Also, since we are becoming a nexus of sorts for online video, these deals are starting to look more and more realistic.
EG: What is TubeMogul working on now to stay ahead of the curve with online video deployment and marketing tools? Any ideas or concepts you could share?
DB: Our main focus is on more distribution venues, richer data and new features. One of our current Premium Products will be made free in August. We are also constantly querying the data to look for trends for new studies. Increasingly, journalists and advertisers are calling with questions and interesting ideas.
EG: Any new video sharing sites that are emerging or are doing things to really augment the user experience?
DB: One video sharing site that’s really doing exciting things is Viddler. They have a really cool player that allows viewers to tag and place comments or video response links anywhere along the player timeline. It really has taken the video player to another level of online functionality and interactivity for the user.
EG: Thanks David!
