Pre-Roll Ads Are Re-Purposed TV, Except No One Watches Them
Problem
The most dominant form of online video advertising is still a nuisance to a large portion of consumers, according to a study* from analytics firm TubeMogul.
Right now pre-rolls are largely dominated by marketers attempting to monetize old TV creative, which exists in abundance, and which can be repurposed for online ads with relative ease. To consumers this is nothing more than the next generation of pop-up ads.
Just how bad is it, you ask? Read more
What’s the killer app for TV? How About TV?!
Turns out people watch more television than they’d like to admit. A lot more.
From The Ad Contrarian via the Economist:
…one of the oddest and most consistent findings of television research: that people seem unaware of their own behaviour. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form. In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television… a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time.
Efforts to improve the TV-watching experience have often gone wrong because they took people at their word. The past ten years have seen a parade of websites and set-top boxes—Apple TV, Boxee, Joost, Roku—offering a huge range of content and interactive features. All promised to deliver TV the way people (that is, individuals) really want it…. Efforts to turn TVs into personal e-mail devices and home-shopping outlets have fared no better. “The killer application on television turns out to be television,” says Richard Lindsay-Davies, CEO of the Digital TV Group.
It always amazes us when people say “they don’t watch TV anymore.” Now we know why.
RedGrey Concepts In Action
Molly Maid Pilot Shoot for Service Brands International
Here are a couple photos from a recent shoot end-client Service Brands International. We’re going to be shooting 300 videos just like this one with online marketing partner Local Inbound Marketing at Molly Maid’s yearly conference in Las Vegas in October (tentative).
Uploading video to your Google Local Business Listing account, and tagging it with the appropriate keyword and geographic metadata, is a great way to boost your organic search results. Service Brands International is deploying this strategy to all their Mr Handyman and Molly Maid franchises in the United States.
What is Bitrate?
What is Bitrate and Why Should You Care?
Whether you’re a professional video producer, or editing video for the first time, understanding “Bitrate” is essential to producing top-quality video. Here’s everything you need to know about bitrate and YouTube.
How Online Video Marketing Improved Our Web Traffic by 105% in 7 Days
Incorporating online video and online video marketing strategies with our new website roll-out has yielded tremendous results, and useful tips for those interested in using online video to gain awareness and increase sales. Read more
5 Ways Video Enhances Your Marketing Campaign
Online video and online video marketing enhance every aspect of your marketing campaign. It’s important to not only consider the type of video you want for your business, but also the different ways you can utilize the video after it’s been produced.
Online Video Viewing Increases, But Not at the Expense of TV
As online content creators, it has become our mission to destroy people’s desire and need to actually read books. Just kidding. My mom is a librarian and I love reading, but as John Burbank of Nielsen Online says in the video posted below, online video viewing is on a major surge!
Also, TV watching is not being cannibalized as much as once predicted. A campaign that includes both TV AND online video can produce shock and awe.
The Death of Newspaper – Is It a Bad Thing?
The Seattle P.I. has gone totally digital, and this is just the beginning of a massive shift of newspapers to a digital format. There is something nostalgic about turning the pages of a newspaper. It’s musty smell and the noise it makes when you shake it out to read the inside articles are admittedly more personal than the droning sound of a double clicking mouse.
As we move further and further along the digital path conventional newspapers just cannot keep up with internet in terms of providing up to the minute news that we crave in our negative attention span society. Many of the headline news stories I read in newspapers I had already read the day before from an online news source.
In today’s world no one has time to read things twice (though we would be much better off if we did and would hopefully understand a lot more of the issues). With advertisers recognizing this digital shift, it has left ALL newspapers struggling for cash flow, and they are all high on the economic endangered species list.
The scary part for newspapers is we are not even close to reaching the potential that online news can offer. With the ever-changing enhancement of handheld devices, the ability to read online news on-the-go will continue to grow. I hate to say it, but in ten years the greatest use of newspaper will be for packing boxes and wiping off windshields.
Luckily this does not mean that newspaper people will be the ones out on the street corner wiping said windshields. As conventional newspapers continue to shrink, the demand for higher quality digital news reporting will be needed. There will of course be casualties, but good newspapers have set a standard that people want in news reporting, and in order to maximize the digital news phenomenon, these reporters and staff will be the part of the foundation.
My hope is that with this transition we will not lose the personal and local unity that newspapers provide. Though it was never what you bought the paper for, the small local stories were always what I ended up liking the most. On your third cup of coffee maybe you didn’t read the whole LifeStyle Section, but you could persuse through and come up away with something that bonded you a little more with the Seattle streets we walk each day. It made the world seem a little smaller and I hope that the digital version of newspapers can continue this bond.
Let us not totally mourn the death of the conventional PI, in the long run I believe they will be ahead of the game. If they can keep their quality up and gain momentum in the digital news format, they have the opportunity to be a shining example of what a digital newspaper can become.
(Submission by Dave Hayes)
Top Online Video Distribution Sites
I recently came across a great article* in Layers Magazine that detailed demographic information for the top online video sites in the US. Many of the sites were mentioned in my previous post,
while some were new and worth mentioning. Since the article wasn’t available online, I thought I’d share it here.
RedGrey regularly posts client work to all these sites and more as part of our World Wide Upload Service.
• YouTube (YouTube.com): Biggest of all video distribution sites
Avg Traffic: Nearly 70 million monthly uniques; 74 page views/person; 0:55:52 minutes spent on site.
Demographics: Surprisingly, the audience only slants slightly younger; roughly even male/female; relatively less educated.
• MySpace (MySpace.com): Primarily a social networking site, but video is widely used
Avg Traffic: 12.5 million monthly unique visitors; 23 page views/person; 0:07:03 minutes spent on site.
Demographics Only slightly younger; even male/female; relatively less educated.
• Revver (Revver.com): This site employs an ad sharing revenue system similar to Google AdWords, but for video
Avg Traffic: 8+ million monthly uniques; 16 page views/person; 0:08:07 mins on site.
Demographics: Slightly more male; age relatively older.
• Veoh (Veoh.com): Focus on full-screen online video for broadband users.
Avg Traffic: 3.6 million monthly uniques; 30 pages viewed/person; 0:41:29 minutes on site.
Demographics: slightly more male; even age.
• Metacafe (Metacafe.com): Popular worldwide distribution. Quality over quantity distinction.
Avg Traffic: 3.5 million monthy uniques; 15 pages/person; 0:07:10 mins on site.
Demo: Almost 3:1 male to female; relatively even education and income.
• Yahoo! Video (video.Yahoo.com): Sleek, entertainment-oriented video site (not fully integrated w/rest of Yahoo!’s community destinations)
Avg Traffic: 3.2 million uniques/month; 4 page views/person; 0:03:16 mins on site.
Demo: Slightly more male; slants older.
• blip.tv (blip.tv): Publisher-friendly video sharing and distribution site
Avg Traffic: 1.3 million monthly uniques; 3 page views/person; 0:02:43 mins spent on site.
Demo: Slightly more male; higher education and income.
• Vimeo (Vimeo.com): Hip, user-generated content
Avg Traffic: 1.3 million monthly uniques; 5 page views/person.
Demo: 2:1 male-to-female ratio; high income and college educated.
• Google Video (video.google.com): One of the first video sharing sites to offer ad revenue sharing w/publishers
Avg Traffic: 436,000 monthly unique visitors; 3 page views/person; 0:02:34 mins on site.
Demo: Unavailable.
• Viddler (Viddler.com): Newer site with cool features like comments tied to a particular time in the video and automatic webcam sync.
Avg Traffic: Unavailable.
Demo: Slightly more male; college educated.
• Facebook (Facebook.com): Another major social networking site with over 100 million users. 4th most-trafficked website in the world.
Avg Traffic: See above.
Demo: Wide-ranging and segmented.
Online video does a great job of not just furthering a business objective. It also exposes your personality and art to others who may not otherwise see it. A good video can inspire you just as much as it inspires others, so take advantage of it!
* Rod’s Top 12 Video Distribution Sites, Page 89, Layers Magazine, November/December 2008
