Tag Archives: recession

Economy Pushes Advertisers to UGC (user generated content)

Remember my post about 10 reasons online-video advertising (the smart ways) will be recession proof? Here’s something written days later, and worth reading. Good for creators worrying about your revenue in 2009, or advertisers looking how to spread your 2009 spending…

From Jack Meyers’ media report.

“Marketers need to determine how they can put less money to work yet generate greater marketing impact.” points out Magnify Media (www.magnify.net) founder and president Steve Rosenbaum, “As they scale back will they put their dollars into network or will they look for their consumers in different ways,” Rosenbaum asks. “People are challenged now to do more with less and they are standing back, taking a hard look at their core assets and opportunities. Online video is a growth category and publishers will be turning to video asset aggregation and curated content to generate more page views, more users, and more money while cutting back on their costs.”

10 Decent Reasons Online Video Ads ‘r Recession Resistant

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.

Is Online-Video Recession Proof?

Online-video advertising is still dwarfed by television advertising. But fear not the recession, online video advocates! Fear not these gloomy photos of the depression that you’re seeing on all of the weekly magazines. And this is according to  Christine Beardsell from Digitas writes in a ClickZ article.

Here are three reasons Beardsell says online video advertising will come out ahead during an economic downturn. Parenthetically, search “recession” on Google Trends to see how freaked people are getting.

  1. No Longer Experimental. Past economic crises often led CMOs to cut back on experimental advertising, and they rely on the skills and responsibilities they’ve traditionally relied upon… as Keith Bobier, senior director of marketing at Unilever, put it: “We are not pulling in the reigns at all…there is nothing experimental about this for us.” In fact, during financial struggles, aren’t the customer-centric things exactly what brands and their customers need most?
  2. Possible, Affordable Optimization: If you’re a marketing executive given the option to either make two new TV spots for the year… or create several video brand content experiences throughout the year that can guarantee measurable, detailed, optimized results and build engagement with your customer, which option would you choose? You get less for more when it comes to TV spots.
  3. Less Buying, More Conversation: While there may be a lot less money to spend when money is tight, that doesn’t necessarily mean people will spend less time engaging with your brand. In fact, frugal spending often means longer hours researching products and discussing those products with trusted friends and family. And with research and conversations now happening predominately online, brands more than ever have the opportunity to join these discussions and help customers make smart purchasing decisions.

I’d add two things. When I tighten my marketing budget, I tend to focus on squeezing down the largest spend, and not starve innovation. So as long as online-video ads provide metrics (see Daisy Whitney’s article on TubeMogul and Visible Measures) then they’re not going to be the first part of the mix that’s cut.