'Net Features : video advertisement

Call-to-Action Buttons Add Value to Videos

Allison Howen — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Receive a better return on investment (ROI) from your videos with a new email widget from StreamSend.

The email marketing service provider’s new widget gives businesses the ability to turn videos into advertisements by adding call-to-action buttons within existing videos. Then, videos can be emailed out as only a call-to-action button. This can help increase the video's audience, because StreamSend’s Email+Video offering enables videos to be played directly within email messages, so that viewers aren't sent to watch the video at another location. This also provides businesses with the opportunity to track video viewing statistics, which can help them optimize future messages according to customers’ interests.

“This new capability lets businesses add value to any video by quickly turning it into an engagement piece that attracts response and increases conversion rates,” said Dan Forootan, president of StreamSend Email Marketing. “Senders can turn any video into an ad that captures that visual impact as a sales piece, and there’s no limit to how far it can be shared with other potential prospects.”

As mentioned, businesses can add call-to-action buttons to any existing video, including YouTube videos, in order to create an advertising message that can be sent as an email, posted on a blog and on numerous other sites. The call-to-action buttons can be made to send customers to an order page, to print out a coupon, to sign up for a mailing list and more. Additionally, senders can add share icons that allow viewers to share videos on social networks, as well as within emails and blogs.

Online Video Ad Views Jump 78 Percent

Allison Howen — Wed, 30 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Social media and online video are two of the hottest topics on the Web today – so it should be no surprise that social video ads are more popular than ever.

A report from social video analytics and advertising platform Visible Measures reveals that social video advertisements received more than 1.3 billion views in Q1 of 2012, which is a 78-percent rise over Q4 2011. And while Q1 usually maintains the largest numbers of social video views due to Super Bowl advertisements, the video success in Q1 of 2012 is also more than a 40-percent increase compared to the same time last year.

The report also notes that the most watched online video advertisement creative approach in Q1 of 2012 was humor – with these types of ads receiving more than 489 million views. The second most watched type of campaigns featured celebrities and generated more than 326 million views, which was followed by the community and activism approach, animation campaigns and product demos.

With the continuous growth of social networks, it is more important than ever for marketers to understand best practices when it comes to creating online video ads, because unlike traditional commercials, consumers are choosing to watch these videos. By creating a captivating advertisement, marketers not only increase their chances of going viral, but also the probability that consumers will share these videos with their networks, resulting in word-of-mouth advertising – which isn't only valuable, but also completely free.

Check out these Website Magazine articles below for more online video optimization tips:

PlayTime – Audience Targeting with Third-party Data

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Video, like news about Kim Kardashian's love life, is wildly popular right now. Unlike her recent marriage, however, online video is going to last and continue to expand its role in user content consumption.

This also means that it will be crucial for marketers trying to share their messages with an audience growing increasingly interested in video content.

Standing out among the crowd with video advertisements can be difficult for brands, especially smaller and medium-sized companies with limited budgets. Because of this, audience targeting can play a huge part in spreading the message of a growing company to relevant consumers on the Web.

Several new targeting capabilities have been introduced into TubeMogul’s video advertising platform PlayTime. The features should provide brand advertisers a bit more control in reaching audiences within their in-stream and display placements.

“Consumers are constantly adapting, forming opinions of a brand and making last-minute purchase decisions,” says Brett Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of TubeMogul. “Video advertisers deserve tools that are as nuanced as these customers and the measurement to see if they are working.”

And nuanced it is. Advertisers are now able to choose which audiences to target across a set of pre-selected and contextually relevant sites, and choose third-party audience segments based on consumer intent, demographics, purchase history and interest by using TubeMobule’s audience selector tool. Data providers include BlueKai, Acxiom, DataLogix, IXI, Lotame, Nielsen, ShareThis, RapLeaf and TARGUSinfo. PlayTime is also now supporting advertisers interested in using their own first-party data.

“Using audience data inherently involves a lot of experimenting and tweaking, and we typically see great lift in purchase intent and product recall following video exposure ,” says John Grudnowski, CEO of FRWD. "To have this all accessible with built-in reporting opens up more possibilities to make an impact across media inventory. It's very interesting."

Half of U.S. Views Online Video Ads

Michael Garrity — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:30:00 GMT

Digital analytics firm comScore unveiled its August Web video rankings recently which show that, among other things, Americans watch a lot of videos on the Internet.

Without question, most videos that are viewed online are watched on YouTube; in fact, the Google-owned video streaming site racked up a total of 162 million unique visitors in the month of August. VEVO came in second with 62 million viewers and Facebook, believe it or not, was the third most popular video site on the Internet with 51.6 million people watching videos. Following the social network were Viacom Digital (fourth), Microsoft (fifth), Yahoo (sixth) and AOL (seventh), though on the whole, unique video watchers were on the rise across the board.

In fact, the total number of viewing sessions in August reached an all-time high as there were 6.9 billion sessions recorded during the month. YouTube and Google Sites hosted just over half of them.

What's more, approximately 85.8 percent of the U.S. "Internet audience" watched videos online in August, and the average Web video watcher took in approximately 18 hours of content. YouTube led the race, with an average of 5.7 hours of engagement per user, while Hulu came in second with an average of 3.2 hours.

And while that data is all well and good, it's not exactly useful to Web businesses or Internet marketers, at least until one considers the role that advertising plays in all of that video watching.

comScore calculates that there were over 5.6 billion video ads watched by Americans in just one month (to put it in perspective, the world's total population is just under 7 billion people). Statistically, this means that half of the population of the U.S. were exposed to video advertising an average of 37.6 times, and the total time spent watching video advertisements adds up to over 2.5 billion minutes. Remember, this is all in a single month.

Video ads made up about 13.4 percent of all videos viewed in August and account for about 1.3 percent of the minutes spent watching online videos.

Of course, what this ultimately means is that online video advertisers can reach a whole lot of people.

Video Advertising Affiliate Program

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:56:00 GMT

Video advertising service Jivox announced an online video advertising affiliate program. I've seen thousands of affiliate programs for publishers interested in reselling advertising, but this may be the first I've seen for video advertising.

The program provides three tiers of participation for online publishers and marketing agencies. Publisher partners will receive a co-branded version of the Jivox video ad service to market the services to their advertisers, agency partners will receive a "master" account to offer the same services to their clients and referral partners (much like a traditional affiliate program) will refer advertisers directly to the Jivox site.

"The Jivox affiliate program allows all our partners to participate in the fast-growing online video advertising category by providing three levels of integration into our online video platform," said Jim Gustke, vice president of marketing and product management at Jivox. "The Jivox online video service is a modular platform that includes ad creation, online hosting and targeting, and access to the online publisher network, which allows our partners to offer all or some of its components. No matter how our partners choose to integrate, by signing up as a Jivox online affiliate, they can give their customers access to highly effective, locally targeted video advertising."

Related information and stories on Jivox: