Tag Archives: data

book, Online Video

10 Decent Reasons Online Video Ads ‘r Recession Resistant

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Oh shut up about the stupid recession, you big whiner. I’m sick of hearing about it — and just because it’s an economic depression doesn’t mean we all have to get clinically depressed.  

Seriously. You’re beginning to sound like that annoying friend who’s always complaining about health problems… The co-worker or neighbor who doesn’t know that the only right answer to “how are you?” is “fine.”

Yes, online advertising is soft. But here are 10 plus reasons online-video will survive and thrive. Read these because I had to think so hard for some of them that I popped one of my 87 remaining brain cells. The statistics, of course, are 97% made up.

Send these to your boss, customers, clients and peers. Or print them and shove ’em up someone’s profusely pessimistic discard hole. Yeah you heard me.

  1. The audience is rapidly growing and ads work 41% better better if they reach people.
  2. The niche content provides better targeting (than 84% of non targeted spending). 
  3. The cost of entry is cheap (unless you piss away $250K on a bunch of “viral video Hail Mary’s” that you post on that micro site… equivalent to a billboard in your basement).
  4. Amateur creators have huge audiences, and are hungry. They’re also really connected with audiences and influential. Your banner ad isn’t as lucky.
  5. I like to eat stamp collections but not collectors.
  6. Video is 93% more visceral and memorable than even rich-media. If I remember your product I’m 29% less likely to forget about it and not buy it.
  7. I was fooling around with features on my YouTube channel, and decided to make my account invisible because I feel like it. That’s a sidebar.
  8. Brands will need recession-proof innovation… instead of interruption ads, they’ll partner with creators who already have huge audiences, and get great deals. Add up the top few dozen YouTube stars and you’ll find they get more daily views than many of the media sites combined. Shoot I get around 100,000 viewers a day and I suck the funny right out of the web.
  9. There is no reason 9 or 13. There’s a 33% chance you won’t notice that because you’re scanning.
  10. Brand leaders will still want to innovate (73% more than the control, which included that fat guy you work with that twitches out about “process” whenever he hears about change). Grant, they will be 41% more selective than this year and 88% than during The Bubble. So dump the stupid unscalable crap (like another useless Facebook widgets and those pitiful Second Life pilots). They’re like the PR people during layoffs. They’ll be first to go.
  11. People still need customers or sales tend to go down by 29% or more.
  12. Because I said so, and I’m a viral video genius. Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. There’s a 51% chance you’ve never heard of Wikipedia.
book, Online Video

Televisions Obsolete. Online Video Takes Over.

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No I’m just kidding. Television isn’t dead yet (but I’ll let you know when it is).

You didn’t waste money on that high definition set, and you advertising executives still have a little shelf life.

But here’s a new tidbit of research that verifies that online-video consumption is eating into our television viewing time. Courtesy of NewTeeVee (who I’m quoting way too often since they became my top RSS on iGoogle) and the folks from the Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) (click here for full report via pdf):

Based on its tracking of primetime content across the major networks, IMMI has generally found that up to 20% of episodic content viewing occurs online, depending on the genre of the content
and the amount of time the show has been on the air. This amount is higher now, than last Fall
and in a few cases, is higher even than DVR viewing of the broadcast content.

This shift won’t soon reverse, or continue slowly. So that means it’s officially time to find a viable advertising model for free online video (and explore a fair paid model too). :

Try forcing a long preroll, and the advertisers have bigger problems than DVRs allowing people to zip through 30 and 60s (as if they weren’t running off to pee before time-shifting). But the good news is that the music industry helped us transition from copyright pirates into, to some extent, people too lazy to hunt and download free music. In time, it will be easier to pay a small fee or accept some ads as long as I can watch good quality video on my own time.

Now that the industry is maturing, watch for: bigger audiences, a better ad model, and more professional content. The amateurs are already losing share to professionals (check the YouTube most subscribed charts for proof), but the pie is continuing to grow. And as long as the economy doesn’t starve marketing innovative budgets (and force marketers to resort to proven but dying media) then I’m still bullish on the opportunities for advertisers, creators and audiences.

Keep in mind the pretty charts by IMMI are a little deceptive. Like this ‘ere chart. It does not tell us that 50% of an average American’s time is moving to online video. Rather it says that half of us — upon being assaulted by a survey — acknowledge that, at some point, we looked to the Internet in lieu of television. I’m surprised that number isn’t higher. Most of us early adopters are probably close to 50/50 online-video vs. television right now.

But keep in mind that even though we’re all still watching television, our brains are clinically dead during this time (well, maybe just more dead than when we’re watching online video or pretending to care about the person rambling in that meeting).