According to Ooyala, the world is on a path to watching more video on smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles/connected TVs based on numbers from 2011′s fourth quarter.

Good bye traditional video. According to a new study, viewers are watching more videos online, and at the same time, are increasingly engaged in the content they watch. It’s not just desktop viewing either—video plays on tablets, gaming consoles and connected TVs have nearly doubled since quarter three of last year.

At least that’s what online video provider Ooyala is asserting, based on the data from its video platform. The provider recently released its fourth quarter review of the viewing habits of its users. The company boasts 1 billion data queries a day, and measures the anonymized viewing habits of 100 million unique users monthly.

Also, half the company’s video plays are outside the US, and partners broadcast to over 110 countries. The statistics take into account bit rate & connection speed for the Ooyala video player in these countries. The growth in the online video watching trend stretches across developed markets like the US and Europe as well as countries like Brazil Chine, Russia and India.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the company observed “phenomenal growth” in video plays on tablets, smartphones, connect TV devices and gaming consoles. With adoption of these types of devices on the rise, this trend is expected to continue on through 2012 and beyond.

“While people are still watching much more traditional TV than streaming video, our data shows we’re on a clear and irreversible course toward an IP-delivered future,” said Ooyala co-founder, Bismark Lepe.

In general, more users watched longer on all four of these types of devices in quarter four; 21.9 percent longer than in quarter three. Ooyala posits that “big screens are for big content,” since long-form videos received the most play on connected TV and game consoles (CTV&GC) as well as tablets. Users who watched videos longer than 10 minutes on CTV&GC tended to complete videos the most, at a rate of 47 percent. Interestingly, while Google TV’s share of the pie is still small, the report found that Google TV’s share grew by 91 percent.

Tablets’ had the largest growth in share of video plays, and 38 percent of tablet viewers managed to complete videos longer than 10 minutes. The least engaged users were those with mobile devices. Comparing iOS to Android, both are growing, but the iPhone outpaced Android in quarter due to the release of the iPhone 4S in October.

The data also suggests that video watchers tend to avoid tweeting when sharing videos. Facebook seems the preferred method of video sharing. For every video tweeted, there were 10 videos posted on Facebook in quarter four. The Ooyala report points out that users shared more videos by copying and pasting a URL than by tweeting it.

The Facebook dominance is probably good news for Netflix’s social networking integration plans. Streaming video companies like Hulu, Netflix and possibly Amazon, seem to have the right idea when it comes to original content. At least, according to Ooyala’s line of thought: Multi-device video consumption is creating a shift in dynamics, and “IP-delivered video” is creating new opportunities for publishers.

“As more broadcast-quality and original TV content becomes available online, expect an increasing number of viewers to watch their favorite shows on tablets, smartphones, Rokus and Xboxes,” the Ooyala report concludes.

Social video sharing has experienced massive growth over the past five years.

Social video: sharing soars as brands become friends with consumers

Since 2006, when the most-shared video was Unilever’s ‘Dove Evolution’, there has been a 20-fold increase in the sharing of branded content.

Even over the last year, the increase is significant. In 2010, the top 20 most-shared videos generated five million shares (5,302,340) and 205,850,936 views.

In 2011, the top 20 ads generated 25 million shares (24,599,860), nearly a five-fold increase from 2010 levels. Views rose to 236,451,183.

Sarah Wood, Unruly COO and co-founder, said: “‘The Viral Spiral’ visualises the indisputable fact that social media has revolutionised what, why and how brands communicate with their audience and what, why and how a rising generation of digital natives are building and maintaining relationships with their peers.

“As brands behave increasingly like our friends – sharing their news on Twitter, seeking our opinions via Facebook, creating content that get us talking – consumers are increasingly open to watching and sharing branded video content.”

Wood said that the data demonstrated that ads which “make us laugh out loud or move us to tears are most likely to be shared”.

She added: “The stronger the emotional experience, the more likely the viewer will go on to share the content and the deeper the connection they develop with the brand.”

One prediction all futurists and bloggers are expecting for 2012 is the continuing rise of mobile content. Last year saw huge growth within the mobile sector – with Smartphones and tablets transitioning from luxury items to lifestyle necessities.

While desktops still account for the vast majority of total online video views, mobile video views is experiencing a boom – accelerated by technology, social media and apps – and will continue to grow throughout 2012. But we already know this. What is interesting though is how users are interacting with mobile video.

Video hosting site Wista recently published a great infographic, showing us that viewing behaviour changes massively when viewing video on different devises.

(click to enlarge)

Desktop users are only truly engaged in short-form videos and they have much less patience so click off videos much earlier than mobile viewers – presumably given the amount of distractions and various call-to-actions on larger screen resolutions.

Mobile viewers will stay engaged in video content for twice as long as desktops – they are less distracted and are more likely to engage in content.

Tablet viewers in particular are more interested in longer-form videos – around half of all views on tablets are over 6 minutes with a large proportion over the 10 minute mark.

Advertisers need to carefully consider which devises their target audience is using – which may result in single ad campaigns being split into various forms. As websites begin to adopt responsive and adaptable structures to cater for mobile and tablet viewers, ads will eventually need to become dynamic and feed users content appropriate to their devise.

Businesses need to invest in quality content

I believe we’ll see a surge of quality over quantity in content marketing heading into 2012. As more businesses understand and embrace the imperative for integrating social media into their marketing strategy, I hope they will also recognize the need to stand out in the cacophony of brand messages on the social channels.

In 2012, if businesses want to compete effectively for consumer attention, they will need to engage with tailored, customer-focused and relevant content in order to differentiate themselves from the noisy brand broadcasters.

Regularly creating unique content will become essential

For a company or brand to be successful marketing with social media in 2012, two main things will need to happen.

Create unique content. So many brands and individuals are creating amazing content that you will need to do something not only amazing but unique, so that you gain the attention you’re looking for.
Be consistent. You can’t just create this unique content a few times; you need to create a schedule for yours business to come out with unique content on a consistent basis.
If you fail to do both of these, someone else will gain your customers’ attention.

Photo and video social networks will blossom

We’ve been nibbling around it for a while, but 2012 will be the year of the multimedia social network.

Photo- and video-based social interaction will grow. There is more meat on Instagram and Viddy and Tout than bun, and that enables the whole point of social networking—making and perpetuating connections and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

I don’t expect these services to dethrone Facebook, as many people simply are not comfortable with multimedia. But already you’re seeing power users reduce their Facebook (and Twitter) musings in favor of multimedia, where a picture (or video) speaks louder than 140 characters.

Online video has been tipped as one of the fastest-growing digital channels for 2011. The past six months have seen a host of innovative campaigns hit the market from the M&S interactive branded video campaign featuring click-to-buy to the Doritos user-generated ’King of Ads’ campaign, which called on the public to create their own ads, with the winner played during ITV’s World Cup coverage.

With consumer attention now divided across multiple platforms – from TV, PC and mobile, to tablets such as the iPad, and now the rise of web-connected TVs, the opportunities for video to cross over are ever-increasing.

Opportunities range from interactive pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads during long-form video-on-demand content to interactive ’skins’ that add a branded frame around a video player on a website, to viral, user-generated, and brand-funded content. Deciding which ad format will best suit a brand’s campaign objectives is a challenge. Some have proved more effective than others.

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), Sky and media research agency Decipher has helped shed light on which formats have proved the most effective. According to the study, which tracked 24 short-form video campaigns from 11 brands over 12 months, video campaigns combining pre-roll and banner ads deliver the highest recall rates.

Five different ad formats were examined, and of the 6,000 respondents interviewed, nearly half (47%) recalled ads that used a combination of pre-roll and banners, although 44% said they remembered the ad when pre-roll alone was used.

The research showed that branded video players, which include wrap-around ads that remain while content is playing, delivered the highest click-through rates, with an average of 1.23% across all campaigns. Branded clickable overlays, which run over a section of the video, sometimes with banners along the bottom of the video, were the least effective, averaging a 0.16% click-through rate.

However, click-through is not the only aim of online video campaigns. Other advertisers, particularly retailers, are looking into the mechanics of click-to-buy, where users can click on items in the video itself to make a purchase. Debenhams and M&S, for example, now have their own online TV channels, where the majority of their video, complete with click-to-buy content, now sits.

Both have run interactive branded content campaigns in the last six months.

Simon Wood, M&S head of web operations, says video is providing a significant commercial return. “We know that customers who watch video spend longer on our site, view three times the number of products and deliver a sales increase of 30% compared to those who don’t view any video content,” he says.

Simon Forster, Debenhams online trading director, agrees the benefits of video are all measureable around customer engagement, viewing times and click-to-buy. However, he says it is important to be clear of the purpose of each video clip. “Customer engagement cannot always be determined by a return-on-investment – video allows us to combine brand advertising and brand development as well as being a great transactional tool,” he says.

Another brand that has effectively monetised its video campaigns is Doritos. The brand saw a 15% year-on-year sales uplift following its “Late Night” global branded-video campaign (see case study box). For this it worked with advertising agency AMV BBDO to strike exclusive deals with British music artists Rhianna and Professor Green.

Video has also proved an effective tool for FMCG brands looking to reposition their product identities. The last few months have seen brands including Unilever and Heinz launch campaigns using interactive, celebrity-fronted videos to help trigger a change in consumer behaviour.

In January, Unilever launched a year-long digital campaign with Channel 4 that uses video to reposition Hellmann’s mayonnaise as a cooking ingredient rather than a condiment.

Likewise, last October Heinz launched a seven-figure digitally-led campaign to drive diversity in how consumers use Heinz tomato ketchup. The ’Secret Ingredient’ campaign centred on recipe videos fronted by Michelin-starred celebrity chef Paul Rankin, talking to consumers about other cooking uses of tomato ketchup.

The FMCG giant also worked with supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons to promote the campaign via online and offline channels, and drive people to the campaign site. The videos ran on the Heinz campaign site, as well as Asda’s website.

Heinz senior brand manager Ian McCarthy says it is well on its way to hitting its target of 150,000 unique users to the site, and has built a 36,000-strong community on Facebook since the campaign. Average dwell time is also strong at over eight minutes.

“We wanted to change consumer behaviour and how they use Heinz tomato ketchup – this required an additional level of information and interactivity from the consumer – that couldn’t have been done with other media such as print or straight online media.”

He reckons video also helps break down complex campaign messages that require shifts in consumer behaviour. “A celebrity chef talking directly to a consumer is so much more impactful and inspiring through online video content than it would be in a static way,” he says.

The past year has seen brands delve further into extending traditional TV campaigns beyond merely repurposing a TV ad online. This can vary from producing additional, exclusive online footage to producing web spin-offs from existing TV campaigns.

Last November, Kia Motors dedicated a third of its £2m campaign spend to online video, for its new Sportage model. The two-month campaign used three characters from Kia’s TV ads, part of its sponsorship of ITV’s FA Cup coverage, and extended them online, adding extra content. These characters – Keith, Ian and Andy, perform a range of driving stunts and challenges in the videos.

At the time Lawrence Hamilton, marketing general manager for Kia UK, told Marketing Week’s sister publication New Media Age that using characters and stories as the backbone for video ads is the most effective way to increase engagement and boost sales. “Videos can come in very flat presentation-type formats, which people are used to, so they’re more likely to go unnoticed,” he said. “But if there’s a story and characters people can interact with, that’s more compelling.”

Lucozade has a different approach to its video strategy. It works with media agency Mediacom to roll out video prior to rolling out its TV campaigns, to stir up interest. Lucozade marketing director Suzy Smith says online TV catch-up content has such a critical mass the company can’t afford to ignore it.

“We would be missing a significant segment of our consumers if we didn’t advertise around it. Our investment in video-on-demand (VOD) is growing and is now a regular part of our audio visual spend, including TV and cinema. We see VOD as a great way of reaching an early adopter audience, so we use it to seed our content ahead of linear TV launch and to hit a core youth audience who find the idea of appointment-to-view TV anachronistic.”

Ensuring a campaign integrates seamlessly across multiple channels is a challenge, but one at which certain brands are becoming very adept. Debenhams has made bold strides in this area, its most notable involving a year-long tie-up with Channel 5.

The deal includes video ads around the broadcaster’s soap Neighbours, both online and on TV. The ads are a spoof of the Neighbours credit sequence montage, starring models wearing Debenhams seasonal ensembles. Clothes featured in the ads are tagged with “As seen on TV”, while online ads run around video content on Five.tv, the Neighbours website, and the broadcaster’s dedicated soaps website.

Forster at Debenhams says video is a “key tool” in developing its multichannel message. “We see it as one of the best media for customer engagement, creating emotion and building brand advocacy. It’s also transportable, allowing us to promote the same messages through multiple channels concurrently,” he adds.

Getting viewers involved with the making of ads is also a powerful technique. Doritos launched its King of Ads campaign during ITV’s coverage of the World Cup, calling on people to create their own video ad, with the winning entry airing on ITV during the tournament, and winning a prize of £200,000. Doritos had 3,000 entries and over a million views of the content.

Social media has also reinvigorated viral video, and how it drives brand engagement. Incorporating more social features into video is something brands need to explore. Brands such as M&S are using video to engage consumers via social media channels, and Wood adds that video helps kick-start conversations that build communities, and eventually sales.

“We can also use the social network to help spread content peer to peer which is increasingly being seen as the most effective way to communicate with consumers. Those who pass on messages from us in a positive way are more likely to become advocates who could potentially validate purchases with other consumers. If our messages fail to get passed on then we know we must up our game,” he says.

The rise of branded video content has paved the way for brands to entertain and engage consumers as media companies in their own right.

Steve Taylor, non-executive director at Monterosa, the company that co-developed the playalong game format for Endemol and Channel 4’s gameshow Million Pound Drop, reckons the future of advertising is in branded mini-content gaming and entertainment formats.

The company is in the midst of developing formats like this. “We call these Active Brand Content, and they cover a gamut of possible formats from enhanced display ads to branded mini-games and mini-entertainment formats.”

Taylor believes video’s most valuable role is as supporting content rather than advertising. “Video has its place in the evolution of digital advertising, but it’s a way-station, not the destination. We see a brighter – potentially bigger – future in ads that get you doing something in real-time, and create a virtuous circle between the TV and the internet.”

Source : Jessica Davies reporter  New Media Age

How do you measure the results from your ad campaigns? What data gets your head of marketing or CEO excited? There is a plethora of measurement tools out there, which all play their part in analysing the results and go some way to indicating whether we are doing the right thing with our online marketing.

Video advertising is slightly different. By comparison to industries like search and affiliate marketing, the general consensus is that measuring video advertising is limited. There are still many who believe that, like conventional TV advertising, there is an element of a scattergun approach, spraying ads across a group of sites to reach an audience that is inferred to be, say, 25-54-year-old males.

They think that paying a guaranteed cost per impression up front and simply hitting an index of an audience is the way it’s done.

Don’t get me wrong, demographics are very useful and tell us a great deal about our market and there are several additional key performance indicators (KPIs) essential to online video. However, video ads can target consumers in a much more sophisticated way than simply by age, sex and site lists, and they can also be measured in a way that tells us a great deal about if and how they’re working. Video ads, by their very nature, involve the consumer. They drive brand engagement for new markets and brand assurance for the converted. While the latter is the icing on the cake, brand engagement is, I believe, the true measure of success. It is the most significant data for advertisers.

Success is measured by how long a viewer spends with the ad but there are also factors that determine brand performance, such as time of day, what viewers were watching beforehand and so on. All are signals that tell us if something is working or not. These are the real measures that determine success and what marketers should be measuring. By measuring the signals that affect and impact the performance of an ad, marketers can learn far more about the reasons behind an ad’s success – or failure – and start to target consumers in a much more sophisticated way.

However, it is possible to get bogged down by this wealth of information. The problem is that there are too many of these signals that could affect the performance of your ads. You need to sort out which ones are important and which ones are red herrings. Different signals can be more or less important for each brand.

Advances in measurement technology help you to differentiate. New technologies are enabling marketers to optimise. This gives advertisers the control, detail and insight needed to trigger an intelligent, informed and effective conversation with the real people that make up historically defined demographic groups.

It is interesting that IPC Media is looking at research findings on ad formats to boost “engagement”’ (nma.co.uk 30 November 2011). It’s realising how important and crucial engagement is.

It seems that we may be turning a corner with brands and advertisers as they begin tounderstand the significance of this sort of data. So, when you decide on a video advertising campaign, remember click-through rates aren’t the only measure.

There’s a wealth of data available to help you make those important changes that will elevate your brand and really engage with your audience to reach those important KPIs.

The strategy includes the brand’s shop-in-shop areas within high end department stores such as Harrods as well as stores in China, the US and Mexico.

It will stream video content from its seasonal ad campaigns, which will change as the in-store fashion collections rotates.

Alex Field, head of marketing for Thomas Pink, says: “It’s a great way of building the brand’s identity but it’s a balance between being a brand showcase and hitting commercial objectives.”

He adds that the brand has learned from its online video content that the products that feature in the video see an uplift in sales, and believes that the same pattern will emerge in stores as it rolls out digital screens.

Customers are bombarded with irrelevant messaging online. Here are 5 ways to use online video to increase customer engagement.