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Video

Video Advertising Works Best When Actually Seen

Video Advertising Works Best When Actually Seen

Would you ever want to receive only a percentage of something you paid for? Of course not. This is precisely why the concept of “video viewability” has been of great interest to brand advertisers, publishers, and agencies, over the course of the past several years.

With the rise of digital video advertising, followed shortly thereafter by the rise of the “bad actors” of the digital ecosystem – ad fraudsters, bots, suspicious traffic, and malware – viewability has become an important metric when analyzing inventory, as well as when analyzing campaign performance.

How Bite-sized Video Content Changes Customer Expectations

Yesterday, Instagram — now part of Facebook — introduced a video feature that allows users to share 15 second clips. The functionality is similar to Twitter's Vine which offers 6 second videos.

Currently, both consumers and marketers are accustomed to sharing photos and text-based status posts. Now, these brief video snippets offer an entirely new way to tell stories.

But haven't videos existed for a while?

It's true that marketers have mastered YouTube as a platform. Established brands routinely post their television spots online to make content available to a broader audience. Once in a while, these videos achieve the holy grail of digital marketing: virality. This was the case recently with the typically conservative retailer Kmart, whose semi-controversial Ship My Pants campaign got over 18 million views.

The Impact of Timing for Viral Videos

Source: eDentalImage

Viral videos are the holy grail of advertising and marketing.

But with the number of videos cluttering the market — over 70 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute — it's hard to make yours stand out, much less spread like wild fire.

Case in point: when Ad Age launched their Viral Video Chart four years ago, the average view count needed to make it on the list was 220,000 views.

Today, it takes 1.5 million views to be considered a viral video. That threshold even accounts for the viewership of clips related to the campaign across the web and on various sites, so it's counting views beyond just YouTube. Even then, that's a 600% increase in the threshold, and perhaps difficulty, in what it takes to go viral.