Katelyn Watson, Online Marketing Manager from Shutterfly discusses how they drove awareness of one of their most prominent products: Photo Books, via utilizing in-banner video advertising. Watch the clip to see the great engagement rates that were achieved.
Archive for the ‘online video’ Category
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Different Strokes for Different Campaigns
Video is a huge focus for our company this year – which is probably not a surprise for most of you given our acquisition of Joost assets last year and the launch of the Joost Video Network last week. We’re creating the most robust end-to-end online video advertising solution in the marketplace – from video ad serving and distribution to creative services and branded entertainment.
One of the important steps in this process is educating our teams on video. A lot of our employees come from online video backgrounds or branding agencies, but for a long time, Adconion has been focused on performance marketing. With our move “up the funnel” to video advertising, it’s important to us to get all of our employees up to speed on the mechanics of an online video branding campaign.
It was during one of these trainings last week in Santa Monica that I mentioned a concept that lies at the heart of the differences between branding and conversion campaigns.
Most conversion campaigns have a clear call to action, such as “Click here to buy now,” “Sign up now to talk with an agent”…the goal is pretty straightforward: here’s a little bit about our offering, now buy it or use it. So if someone is in the market for an item (which we know because it’s a targeted campaign), and doesn’t jump (or, in this case, click) the first time, and doesn’t click the second time, the traditional school of thought is that you’re better off saving the ad impression for a different user. It’s common to see frequency cap around two impressions for these types of conversion campaigns.
As you move up the marketing funnel, though, these rules change. Campaigns become less about driving an immediate action and more about building brand awareness or provoking evaluation of the product. Building brand awareness requires a different formula between the two key elements: time and exposure. Branding campaigns need to serve a higher volume of ads over a shorter period of time – or at least a higher volume of ads over the same period of time – in order to increase brand recall, brand recognition and/or brand loyalty. For online branding campaigns, it’s common to see frequency cap set to as high as 5 to 10 per creative execution – versus the one or two ads per month per user you see with online conversion campaigns.
Since this disparity exists with frequency capping, a very common and (presumably) straightforward campaign element, imagine the potential disparities for other elements of a performance campaign versus a brand awareness campaign – such as day parting, targeting and reach. Frequency capping is just one indicator of the differences between running successful online branding and performance campaigns.
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The New Golden Age of Content Distribution?
Comcast and NBC were back on Capitol Hill last week, testifying about their proposed merger. Interestingly, as the deal began both companies claimed that this deal was not about digital distribution. But as the testimony goes on, it’s clear that even if Comcast and NBC claim they aren’t focusing on emerging technologies, everyone else is.
And they should be. With the erosion of the broadcast hegemony, and the rise of DVRs, video-on-demand and online video, this merger has the potential to shake up the digital industry.
The fact is that an increasing number of Americans are watching time-shifted TV, video-on-demand and online video – and not just on YouTube or Hulu. According to the comScore Video Metrix, more than 50% of online video viewing comes from sites outside the top 25.
All these shifting habits are probably still good news for Comcast. In addition to offering subscription-based DVRs and pay-per-video-on-demand, online video is likely driving demand for Comcast’s broadband services. Once a customer has a broadband connection, there’s little chance they’ll downgrade to dial-up. But as more videos become available online, people might give up their Comcast cable subscriptions. That’s not good news for Comcast, and one of the reasons behind their partnership with Time Warner Cable to provide “TV Everywhere.”
“TV Everywhere” is an attempt by Comcast and Time Warner to go where their audiences are going. After all, people don’t care about the technology that delivers their favorite programming to their screens – they just want the show to play when they hit “on” or press “play.”
With the addition of the NBC Universal cable networks – Bravo, USA Network and SyFy, to name a few – to Comcast’s existing cable networks – like E!, Versus and The Golf Channel – and a dual-stream mode of content delivery, Comcast is well positioned to deliver content to people who want it when and how they want to watch it.
And in our increasingly fragmented media landscape, aggregation and distribution is a good business plan. It’s not enough just to aggregate – it might be sufficient in the short term, providing an incremental revenue stream or somehow making up for lost revenues in other areas of the business. But in order to reach the largest possible audiences, or retain an existing audience, distribution is necessary.
Comcast knows it can’t rely on cable subscriptions forever; NBC knows it has to find a way to monetize its broadcast and cable programming online. Both companies – and other MSOs, studios and record labels – are trying to solve a distribution problem they’d previously had under control, but has broken down in the digital age.
If this deal goes through, it will be a big digital win for Comcast. It already owns the methods of distribution, the two most common pieces of technology people use to access these shows today – the cable and Internet connections – and with the joint venture, it will have found a way to keep these pipes important.
Comcast has chosen its means of audience aggregation, but it’s not possible, and certainly not economical, for a company that wants to become an integral part of content distribution to build its own technological infrastructure. Fortunately, people behave more fluidly on the Internet than they do at home in front of their TV, and it is possible to aggregate interesting and targetable audiences of people online.
Whatever the aggregation technique, and whatever the distribution method, the goal is the same – to distribute content to relevant, interested audiences – and, of course, to make money doing it.
