As our lives get more entwined with digital and related games, and services and apps come out at a rate greater than anyone could possibly keep up, the ability to reach audiences is becoming increasingly fractured. In order to engage mass audiences and compensate for this fracture, marketers seek many slices of many pies to meet their numbers.
However, there is one channel that is massive and growing at a phenomenal rate: online video. In the U.S. alone, there are 190,000,000 unique people who watch online video each month. The key word there is ‘unique’. That represents 77{2bbd478b6aadf2a9bb5e10dcf35d17c0d0772390afbaf5ac8145fb1096668903} of the adults in the U.S. These 244,860,000 (that’s million) people watch 35,000,000,000 (that’s billion) video ads.
This poses a critical question: how do marketers capitalize on this massive, engaged and growing audience?
On Sept. 18, that’s just what AZIMA members dove into at a statistically-fueled presentation from Brock Flint, the SVP of Sales & Business Development for the online video marketing leader Sightly. With nearly 90 attendees in the audience, Brock shared the direction of online video marketing with a presentation followed by a Q&A. (See the presentation here.)
Online video marketing takes many forms ranging from product demos and scripted comedy to sports clips and practical jokers. Video marketing efforts can be stand alone content that drives ad revenue from video views or product support efforts that help conversion rates.
As Brock pointed out, online video, although similar, is not TV. “There’s different content and a different moment of engagement,” he said.
Consider this successful approach by Bradley “The Rad Brad” Colburn. Colburn has a unique and humorous approach to making video game “walkthroughs.” Brad’s content draws 2.3 million subscribers, resulting in estimated ad revenue profit to be more than $2 million dollars (after YouTube’s cut).
As Rad Brad’s success demonstrates, the methods to take advantage of YouTube and online video marketing is wide open. Companies can create familiar assets like product demonstrations and user testimonials or jump out of the box and develop unique content delivery. “We are in a creative renaissance,” Brock said. “I will challenge agencies today and ask ‘what are you doing to challenge your clients.’”
Currently online video advertising is expected to only represent $16 billion of the $93 billion estimated 2017 total online ad spend. With the right planning and content development in place, there’s much opportunity to reach a larger slice of your audience in a more engaging way. “People click on 46{2bbd478b6aadf2a9bb5e10dcf35d17c0d0772390afbaf5ac8145fb1096668903} of really good ads,” shared Brock.
Aside from the massive and growing volume, Brock’s presentation highlighted some of the benefits of video marketing on YouTube, including audience targeting, local reach, interactivity and measurability.
To learn more about how your organization can benefit from this growing medium, visit joinazima.org or contact Brock @sightlyhq.
Student Perspective
The Push and Pull of Video Advertising
AZIMA has been working diligently for the past five years to get the word out about interactive marketing among Arizona agencies, business and students. In this quest, it hosted an event for online video advertising on September 18th with guest speaker Brock Flint from Sightly. On a pleasant Thursday evening, the corridors of the Hilton hosted an enthusiastic group of marketing veterans and beginners to give them a fresh perspective and a deeper understanding of the online video advertising vistas.
Twenty years ago, when we started watching Friends and were too involved to change channels during advertisements, the video advertising franchise found itself a market of sitting ducks. This was the era of push video viewing, and, consequently, push advertising, we had all of 70-80 channels to choose from with matching advertising opportunities. Fast forward to 2010 to see that the internet had blatantly invaded and conquered the telly-space: 190 million people watched videos online in the U.S. alone. Sitcoms are no longer 30 minutes; they are 22 minutes of ad-free viewing.
So what does the modern interactive advertiser do? To the wide-eyed this may seem like a bad time to be in advertising, but as Brock reassuringly pointed out, there is hope! 35 billion ads were watched last year – all that is needed is just a change in strategy. With the advent of skip-able ad formats and the pay per view concept, there is a growing need to capture user attention at the very onset of an ad. The good news is that there is a bounty of data analytic tools available to judge the success of an ad in a target market. Mr. Flint went on to show the benefits of video advertising and the significance of YouTube-like in platforms in the interactive advertising ecosystem (audience and location targeting, measurability, awareness, and engagement to name a few), all the while extracting interesting responses from the audience at the prospect of winning mini torches. Overall, the event was a huge success and everyone had a takeaway from it. My personal favorite was how to start conversations with someone while teaching them how to pin shoelaces to a nametag (put the aglets in the eyelets and let it hang, in case you were wondering).
Student Writer’s Bio
Akanksha Mann is a first year MBA student at the W.P. Carey School of Business and an ex-I.T professional, looking forward to dabbing her feet in Supply Chain and Marketing. She likes reading voraciously, dancing at odd times, wowing people with random facts and writing to unwind. She is open to criticism but digs the complements. You can reach her at [email protected] for either.