You can’t beat a video ad

So online video consumption is a big deal, and it’s becoming an even bigger deal with every week that passes. In the US, watching video online is now more popular than blogging and social networking. Hard to believe, but the statistics are there to prove it.

This represents an enormous, sumo-sized opportunity for marketers. Combined with this appetite for video is the growing reliance on peer reviews: people no longer accept what they’re told, unless they’re told it by the online equivalent of some guy they met in a bar. Video ads, so long as they feel authentic and not sales-y, are an ideal vehicle for “don’t tell me, show me” marketing stories. It’s about credibility, and good video ads have it in spades.

That’s not all, of course. You can’t just launch your video ad and then wave at it as it wanders off into the wilderness. You have to make it SEO-worthy by optimizing the hell out of it, and you need to monitor its success. Otherwise it’s been a very pretty waste of time.

Assessing the impact of your video ads isn’t just nice to have so you can defend your spending budget. It’s essential to managing your ongoing marketing campaign, because if you don’t know what worked and what didn’t, you run the risk of continuing to flog a dead horse. That’s bad for business and bad for your brand.

Does your digital video distribution system let you measure the response you get to your ads: who watched it, how long they watched for and what they did next? If not, you’re missing a fundamental part of video marketing.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 10:15 am and is filed under Advertising and Branding, Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.