In fact, we often kid around and say “What would we do without TV?”  Interestingly, there are countless answers to this question (input your other favorite things to do here).

Today, we (consumers) love watching our favorite content on the web, and our mobile devices.   The convenience (despite the teeny tiny screens) cannot be ignored and is simply a huge part of our everyday lives nowadays.  It’s completely normal to now see a train full of commuters heads-down with their mobile device browsing, watching, reading, listening, laughing and steering (insert your favorite racing game here) to pass time on their way home to their next favorite screen (and to their friends & family of course).

As this trend/way-of-life swells (see the below eMarketer stat), so too will the advertising opportunities.  To allow our favorite content providers to scale their businesses and continue to provide us with mindless entertainment on-the-go, they need money!  Enter the dragon….or the advertisers !  We’ll continue to see more and more advertisements embedded within our favorite content.  Great for some, and annoying for others.  Nonetheless, it’s what will fuel the content we love so much.

As an advertiser, the online video landscape provides a unique, well-targeted, scalable, and measurable media format to deliver an ad/message with much greater consumer engagement (vs other online ad formats).    At Dynamic Logic, we’ve seen a surge of video ad units as part of our clients’ media strategy.   With that comes the want and need to understand how exposure and interaction with online video ad units (vs other online ad formats) impact brand measures (and other online behaviors thru our partnership with Compete).

If you’re planning to include online video ad units to your campaigns, feel free to connect with me anytime to discuss.  We have some interesting norms to share, and I’d be happy to learn more about your objectives and ultimately help develop a measurement strategy that will specifically address the objectives and challenges faced.

Scott Gendelman

Dynamic Logic

312.577.4066

scottg@dynamiclogic.com

]]> http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/04/30/scott-gendleman-writes-about-online-video/feed/ 2 http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/01/14/alejandro-molina-checks-in-with-some-helpful-tips/ http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/01/14/alejandro-molina-checks-in-with-some-helpful-tips/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:02:26 +0000 Mark Blei http://dynamiclogicblog.com/?p=3270 Hi. My name is Alejandro Molina and I work on the tech team in the NYC office as a QA/Support Analyst. I was once an avid user of ad blocking software. But as time went on, I saw site after site close down due to lack of funds. These days, it’s hard to not see how important online advertising can be for sites that need the money to stay afloat. Even so, it’s sometimes hard to see online advertising in a positive light when I run into intrusive ads that take over the webpage and interrupt what I’m doing. Working at a company that tells these online agencies that such ads should be frowned upon is a good feeling.

In my time here, I’ve learned a few other tips about making online advertising more effective. Make sure your ads are not intrusive. Don’t interrupt the user’s experience if you can avoid it. Make the message relevant to the user. If I’m on a website that targets a specific audience, make sure you are advertising product that really is relevant to that particular audience. Also, make sure your ads are perfectly clear and eye catching without being annoying. Attention spans online only last so long, that if your ad is confusing or takes more than a few seconds to get the point, you’ve already lost half your audience scrolling down the page or clicking to somewhere else.

Keep to at least these points and even a former ad blocker like me will pay attention to your ad.

Missed last night’s episode of “Lost”? Check out the Hulu link tweeted by @Lost_on_ABC.

Is it time for President Obama’s latest speech on healthcare reform? The CNN homepage is streaming it live.

Any way you cut it, video content, syndicated or not, is now readily available almost anywhere, or on anything that has an internet connection. The capability of today’s technology is a wide departure from several years ago, when “YouTube” had yet to become daily vernacular and “pre-roll” was all the rage. Now, you couldn’t run from a video stream even if you tried. But what does this mean for the world of media? Does the fact that I can stream a feature-length movie from Netflix onto my Playstation 3 to watch on my HDTV really provide marketers yet another way to hawk their wares? More importantly, “Do I want them to?”

As the methods and vehicles to consume online video become increasingly accessible, viewership of online video will move from access through a computer as it humbly began, to integrated mobile devices, gaming consoles, and even television sets. Consumption is changing; not necessarily how much, but how. I see 3 factors that play into the consumption shift:

1-      Internet video usage – Viewership has increased over 12% in the last year, to nearly 134M users, compared to a .9% increase to 284M traditional TV viewers.

2-      Timeshifted TV – Approximately 30% of US households own a DVR recorder and hour usage per month has increased 19.5% since the past year.

3-      Video on mobile phones – while usage remains relatively low at 15M users this year, this is a 70% increase over 2008, keeping in mind mobile phones do not comprise all mobile devices capable of, or used for video.

Overall internet video usage is up, as is demand for timeshifted TV, which is an inherent characteristic of internet video. Each of these represents a separate trend, which may or may not be correlated, but serve as a guide to the direction in which consumption habits are heading. The widespread penetration of video-enabled mobile devices provides readily available “supply”, as consumers have access to video with relative ease. Nearly two-thirds of Americans ages 13 to 54 have at least one mobile device capable of video. Perhaps the most common video-enabled device, laptops are owned by 57% of Americans. Over one in five have a video-enabled iPod. Perhaps most markedly, 42% of users of all devices claim to use a mobile device to actually watch video.

Granted, there are key differences among the media used by consumers, such as consumption of long form vs. short form video, time spent watching with each medium, etc., but the point is that the evolution of video consumption is certainly not insubstantial, and quite the contrary. As these habits grow and change along with the technology that enables them, eventually, some will become the standard.

So how does one add value to consumer marketing initiatives? Guessing is one option, though probably not preferred or recommended. Consumer desires and pet peeves can be fleeting; what works one moment can change as the industry yet again shifts in another direction. Chalk it up to the quick pace at which our industry evolves! Consumers grow increasingly savvy, empowered by the internet. Gone are the days of passively watching commercials. Today’s consumers are not only engaging on a daily basis with one another, but with brands – something previously unheard of. Media plans are changing to incorporate the expanding marketing repertoire, such as social, viral, mobile, as well as video components. In order to harness the interplay of these efficiently, the approach to take is akin to tuning a musical instrument: pluck a string and listen for feedback; adjust accordingly; rinse, repeat. This does not mean your first foray into emerging media is a blind stab in the dark, nor should it be cause for you to fear utilizing it. This is where research comes into play; ensuring your approach provides you with information that can give you actionable, post-operative insights is crucial to long-term branding success.

Granted, not all parameters of your campaign, such as budget constraints, can allow for costly research. On the other hand, external normative data provides access to a wealth of information at a fraction of the cost. Based on consistently aggregated data, it can not only help guide campaigns in the planning stages toward the best chance of success, but it can be used after the fact to help diagnose issues, or explore any additional questions that may arise.

The following graphs and tables use creative format data from the MarketNorms® database. Using the entertainment industry as an example, video units typically outperform rich media units on awareness, isolated at an exposure of 1; however, rich media may be the better performer when it comes to Purchase Intent. Included below is a calculator that gives a potential cost-effectiveness scenario that not only reinforces this idea, but provides evidence that rich media may also be less expensive to impact each person. This calculator tool populates with MarketNorms® data, allowing for comparisons across various creative attributes, which can be particularly valuable in the planning stages of a campaign. A simple tool such as this can aid in controlling costs in the long run, freeing up resources to focus on the campaign’s value-driven proposition.

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms®

Entertainment Industry ,Rich Media, frequency of 1: Last 3 Years, Q2/2009, N=35, n=46,396

Entertainment Industry, Video, frequency of 1: Full Dataset; N=20, n=29,798
Analysis Adjusted for Frequency

The upside to normative data can also be its downside; it needs to be collected over a length of time, and in a consistent, comparable manner. This takes considerable effort and time, not to mention financial investment. In the end, the best way to market to the consumer is to do it with the best tools available. Research is never the magic 8-ball we hope for. In this case, it’s more like a compass that’s pointing in the direction we should go, but it’s up to us to go out there, traverse the terrain, and gather data along the way, but with a long term goal in mind. Video can be great as a centerpiece or supplement to any campaign; normative research is the tool to help give it the best chance to succeed.

Sources:

1- Nielsen three screen report, Q2/2009

2- http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=112822

3- Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms® database, Q2/2009

If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you. We invite you to call us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here

When I go to the office I live the vicarious life of a virtual tourist. Rather than stepping off a plane or a ship and being immersed in a different culture, I am exposed to a cacophony of out-of-context snapshots of other cultures every work day.

One of my first eye opening experiences in managing Global Operations was a study being run in China. I was keeping an eye on the recruitment levels as it went infield just out of curiosity. The number of survey respondents exploded instantly and grew at speeds that we would never see in the U.S. My first thought was to shut the survey down. Surely we were breaking some agreement with the publishers by commandeering all the available advertising real estate and then inviting every single visitor to take a survey. I naively envisioned 1.3 billion Chinese poised over their keyboards happily waiting to pounce on the next available survey.

Mercifully, one of my counterparts in Beijing explained what I was seeing. It’s not uncommon in China for even some the largest of portal sites to “lease out” their entire site to a single entity or a small group. For all practical purposes, you own all branding rights and advertising real estate on the site. There’s a catch of course. You can only “own” it for a few days at most. Imagine owning all the advertising real estate and data collection rights on a site like Yahoo.com or AOL.com…even for just a few hours.

Here are a few examples of some of those out-of-context, cultural snapshots. I’ve identified them by language since country borders are becoming less and less meaningful in the brave new internet landscape.

Chinese – Seeing this survey throws me every time I see it. This survey involves one of the largest American entertainment icons and is instantly recognizable by probably 99+% of Americans and here it’s mixed with a language that I imagine less than 1% of Americans can decipher. I find it pleasantly disorienting.

Russian – I was born into an era when the Soviet Union was planting nuclear missiles on Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was saying “We will bury you!” (apparently speaking figuratively to capitalism in general). Now I’m helping to execute a study to determine how well the marketing efforts of one the largest American chip manufacturers are going in Russia.

Arabic – Written Arabic is a visually beautiful language. Of course, I wouldn’t even recognize it as a language of any kind if someone didn’t tell me it was so. In addition to the translation issue, Arabic has the additional technical challenge of being written and read from right to left.

I’ve presented three glimpses of data collection across three very different regions and cultures. To paraphrase a saying; the more things change, the more they remain the same. I won’t bore you with numerical results but you can take comfort from the fact that out of this cultural chaos comes one global truth: If you expose people from any culture to enough advertising, it’s going to affect their attitudes and behaviors

I’ll leave it to the advertisers and the philosophers to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

- Scott Kresge

Research Operations Manager – Global

If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you.  No matter if you’re in New York, London, Paris  Munich or anywhere else  . We invite you to learn more by calling us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!

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In invite you to meet Stefan Sellberg

“My name is Stefan Sellberg and I’m the Vice President of Client and Market Development at Dynamic Logic. I have been with Dynamic Logic for over 8 years and I’ve really enjoyed watching the industry mature as an Advertising and content delivery mechanism as well as a platform for conducting Research.

A client came to me earlier in the year asking if we could help them measure a campaign leveraging TV, Print, Online and OOH. They were deploying a two pronged creative approach using both brand and topical advertising. The goals and objectives were to understand the following:

• How is each medium working in isolation and what are the synergistic effects of exposure to multiple mediums
• What creative theme (brand vs. topical) is working most efficiently in driving Brand and Persuasion metrics
• What is the ideal media mix and how can I can reallocate media to optimize campaign performance

I recommended using our CrossMedia solution that incorporates a path model and media simulator/optimization tool. This approach would provide the client a good understanding of campaign performance and allow them to adjust GRP, Print insertion dates and online delivery to optimize performance. While I cannot get into specific results due to client confidentiality, I can say the campaign measurement approach was a huge success. The client found the media simulator extremely helpful and has since made recommendations to adjust GPR weigh to optimize performance.

In addition to media and advertising effectiveness measurement, I like spending my spare time golfing, camping, and enjoying life with friends and family in the thousands of restaurant and bars in Manhattan”

If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you. We invite you to call us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!