When it comes to online advertising, we've certainly come a long way since the dreaded pop-up ad. Email marketing, display ads and paid/organic search have become the bread and butter of online advertising, but the place at which the true capacity of online advertising and customer engagement intersect is, quite clearly, online video. According to Nielsen, online video usage shot up by 53% vs. a year ago in May 2009. This is huge news. Of course, television isn't going away anytime soon, but such an extraordinary surge in consumption habits, thanks to Hulu and YouTube, can't be ignored. As broadband penetration increases and "eyeballs" begin to move increasingly towards online video, it is only logical that advertising follow that very same path. And according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), digital advertising revenue in the first half of 2009 was up 38% from the same period in 2008.
One place where online video is making successful inroads is on news websites. CNN.com's recent web re-design has a dedicated Video tab as part of the main menu, the first to be seen after the Home tab. ESPN.com places its video player up front and center on its homepage, and the Wall Street Journal recently introduced its own webcasting channel "The News Hub", which broadcasts a a twice-daily live video newscast.
But while online video content is growing, how to make online advertising work still remains a game of trial and error. As seen on these news sites, most advertisers are still using online video as an extension of their TV campaigns - running their ads as pre-roll before relevant content or, such as in the case of WSJ, sponsoring the "News Hub" channel on a monthly basis.
I believe that for online video to be successful, advertisers will have to think outside of the box in terms of creative and execution. The ads will need to meet the following 4 criteria:
1. Have engaging storylines and compelling content;
2. Utilize creative ad placement that really brings the screen to life;
3. Provide some kind of value to the customer through interactivity and participation;
4. Require the customer to opt into the ad (accidentally rolling over a rich media ad and being forced to endure a commercial or hunt endlessly for a X/close button is getting tiring).Some good examples of online video done right are Apple's recent executions on the New York Times homepage. Apple extended its "I'm a Mac" campaign to online video by taking over nytimes.com for a day with multiple video placements. See below:
May 18, 2009
November 11, 2009
The videos did lack that element of interactivity where viewers become part of the storyline or where viewer participation yields some kind of value benefit, but they delivered on the other criteria. The videos began playing as soon as you arrived on the site, but they did so on mute and therefore they ran unobtrusively on the sides until you clicked on the Play button and opted to watch them - at that point they interrupted the "auto play" function and started from the beginning so you could follow the storyline. I found this to be a noticeably helpful feature, and with the content being funny and creative, it scored as a fairly successful execution.
What other criteria would you recommend for successful online video executions? Are there other noteworthy examples that you have noticed in the recent past?
