LinkedIn is best known as the social media platform specifically targeting the job market. It’s a place where job seekers can look for work and for recruiters to source their manpower requirements. Lately, however, the Microsoft subsidiary is polishing the networking experience for its users by allowing them to post videos into the platform, a move that mimics YouTube and Facebook Live.
Among the various social media platforms, LinkedIn is a bit late at offering a native video feature. The company has been testing native videos since last month and is now rolling out the feature gradually, which means that it might take some time to reach to all its users.
The new feature is available to both the iOs and Android versions of the LinkedIn mobile app. For the Android version, the video icon can be accessed via the post button while on iOs devices, the video icon is located at the top of the feed. Pressing the icon allows a user to record or post previously recording videos to the platform.
Videos posted on the LinkedIn platform may significantly differ from those found on YouTube. Since the network is basically a business networking tool, users’ video recordings are expected to highlight their professional credentials such as completed and current projects, skills or product demos. While the maximum video length allowed is 10 minutes, LinkedIn recommends that users keep their video recordings between 30 seconds to five minutes in length.
Did you know that video has 6x more engagement than other content such as images, articles etc.? https://t.co/hTEPEphHJU
In case you are wondering why LinkedIn would want to introduce a native video feature to its platform, it has been shown that video content generates better user engagement. For instance, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube collectively generate around 22 billion views per day.
The trend seems to be working on LinkedIn as well. Last month, data analysis showed that its videos were shared 20 times more than any other content. Now the next order of business is how to harness ad dollars sometime into the future.
According to a post on the Instagram Business blog the number one driver of visits to restaurants is the act of craving. In advertising this simply means making people hungry for what your are selling. Restaurants love Instagram because of its visualness, its frequent use of video in posts and probably most importantly, its primarily consumed on a mobile device.
A 2015 study showed that 53% of frequent diners and 41% of occasional diners use their mobile phone to decide on a fast-food restaurant. You have to assume that’s just as prevalent with restaurants in general. Instagram says that for restaurant goers on mobile, 23% take a photo purely to remember the experience, and 15% share that experience on their social channels. They report that after seeing friends’ photos and videos of fast-food restaurants on Instagram, 66% of frequent diners want to visit.
Interestingly, Instagram users that follow restaurants are 1.4 times more active on Instagram than average, indicating that they use the platform for more than just posting photos. Instagram reports that they like 4.5 times more content, post 3 times more than the average user and comment 7 times more frequently than typical. That’s amazing. One wonders if there is some other common variable other than liking restaurants, but we’ll go with that for now.
Since Instagram was launched food has been a big part of the app, with people posting millions of photos and videos of what they were about to eat. Restaurant have taken note of this posting fetish and thought, what can we do to feed into this without becoming another unwanted ad? That’s where the concept of crave comes in. Restaurants are focusing posts and ads on making people hungry, using Italian music when showing a video of a pizza being made, showing extreme closeups of a Ruby Tuesday hamburger so that people can almost taste it, in the case of Fridays showing a very satisfied person eating their ribs. The point is to focus on the food in order to create the crave.
Instagram says that Ruby Tuesday ran a series of 5 video ads and saw a 22-point lift in ad recall—outperforming similar campaigns by 96%. They say it also drove a 10-point lift in purchase intent among 45-54 year olds—which outperformed nearly 75% of similar campaigns for the same demographic.
“TGI Friday’s developed a two-phased campaign that used video and carousel ads, as well as local awareness ads on Facebook, to promote its ribs and encourage people to enjoy them at a physical location,” noted the Instagram ad team. “The six-week company not only drove a 3-point lift in purchase intent, but more than 50,000 restaurant visits were attributed to the campaign.”
Dairy Queen’s Instagram campaign reach 20 million people, driving an 18 point lift in ad recall among 25-34 year olds. They say it also drove an 8 point lift in awareness of its “Upside Down or Free” promotion and a 3 point lift in purchase intent. Not much in purchase intent but it definitely drove the crave.
“We wanted to build up our presence on Instagram and occupy the currently sparse dessert space,” said Jenell Lammers, Digital Marketing Manager, Dairy Queen (View photo at top). “We’ve done just that with this campaign, which further proved that Instagram is not only great for organic posts but can really drive results.”
YouTube has launched ‘Super Chat’ as a way for fans of YouTube stars to make their comments stand out during live stream videos and more importantly as a new financial stream for video creators. Viewers of live streams can purchase a Super Chat in order for their message to be highlighted and pinned to the top for up to 5 hours.
“For creators, this means Super Chat does double duty: keeping their conversations and connections with (super) fans meaningful and lively while also giving creators a new way to make money,” said Barbara Macdonald, Product Manager, Live Streaming & YouTube Gaming. “We’re excited to start the Super Chat beta today with a few creators, such as iHasCupquake, Great Library (buzzbean11) and Alex Wassabi. And we plan to broadly launch Super Chat on January 31 for creators in 20 countries and viewers in more than 40 countries.”
YouTube has also announced an end to Fan Funding, which they launched in 2014. Fan Funding enabled viewers to donate money to video creators to support their operations, but it never took off.
“While we were really excited about Fan Funding, it never achieved widespread usage outside of live streams, where we saw the majority of revenue,” stated Macdonald. “Fan Funding will stop accepting new sign-ups today, but can continue to be used on enabled channels until February 28, when it will be discontinued.”
Google’s DoubleClick announced today the ability to include video with both mobile and desktop native ads. This is important considering that more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile.
“With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.
Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:
“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”
DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile
DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.
“Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”
Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:
“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD
They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.
“Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”
Google has purchased FameBit, a technology and marketing platform that helps brands link up with social media stars on YouTube and Twitter. This is part of a growing trend where Google and others realize that preroll video ads are not the future and that marketing integration into content is the smart way to reach millennial’s and even younger audiences.
Ironically, that’s how television started in the 1950’s, where every show was brought to you by a product and often that product was integrated into the content.
“We believe that Google’s relationship with brands and YouTube’s partnerships with creators, combined with FameBit’s technology and expertise, will help increase the number of branded content opportunities available, bringing even more revenue into the online video community,” noted Ariel Bardin, Vice President, Product Management at Google.
FameBit provides a modern version of this, telling marketers that it will grow your customer base via tutorials, comedic skits, mentions, routines, DIY videos, game plays, lookbooks, vlogs and hauls. What this means is that FameBit, and now YouTube, will connect your brand with YouTube stars and help popular YouTuber’s make additional revenue in the process.
“Every year, more and more brands are making YouTube essential to their marketing strategy,” said Bardin. “In fact, in the last year alone, the top 100 advertisers have increased their spend on YouTube video ads by 50 percent.”
Google knows that even though brands have increased their marketing on YouTube, what they really want are deeper connections with YouTube stars and through extension their fans.
“As brands continue to embrace the value of YouTube, they’re also taking their investments one step further, partnering with creators on branded content opportunities such as product placements, promotions and sponsorships,” he said. “As we look to the future, we want even more creators and brands to come together and realize the benefits of these creative collaborations.”
Unlike Google search, YouTube video is not inherently a lead generation opportunity, but rather is more like TV, promoting brand recognition and brand favorability. Fortunately for Google, that’s what Madison Avenue sells and Google wants to tap into more of their dollars.
According to eMarketer TV ad spending will be $72.01 billion in 2016 with digital ad spending just slightly under that. But with advertising in video formats from YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, etc…, digital ad spend will increase as a percentage. By 2020, it’s predicted that digital ad revenue will be 37% higher than TV.
Of course, digital delivery of TV is also on the rise, replacing the cable middlemen and ultimately making digital the primary way to consume video content.
Google is gearing up to be the go-to place for Rio Olympic Games information. “Next week, the 2016 cauldron will be lit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where thousands of athletes will come together to represent the strength and pride of their home countries with the world as their audience,” says Google Product Manager Jonathan Livni, in a post on the Google Search blog. “In celebration of the next chapter in Olympics history, we’re bringing the best our products have to offer to help people around the world stay up-to-date with the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
Livni lists these products that will help you keep up with the Rio Games:
Discover the event schedule, medal counts, and athlete information in Search
Get results and view TV schedules in 30+ countries
Watch official broadcasters’ event highlights on YouTube in 60+ countries
Explore Rio and venues in Google Maps
Keep up to date with the latest search Trends from around the world
“If you search on the Google app on Android and iOS, you’ll also see an option to get automatic updates on top event and medal wins, so you’ll never miss a beat,” says Livni.
YouTube & The Rio Olympics
“In the last 12 months, over 23,000 years of content have been watched on YouTube for the four most popular Olympic Games’ sports alone – athletics, gymnastics, diving and swimming, and volleyball,” commented Google’s Christoph Heimes, Head of News and Sports Partnerships, EMEA at YouTube. “To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of watching all 17 days of the Olympic Games, 24 hours a day, not once, but over half a million times. Nearly two thirds of that viewership has happened on mobile devices — and even more in countries like the U.S., U.K. and Japan.”
YouTube is sending 15 of their top creators to Rio to live stream everything except the games themselves, because NBC will be broadcasting these considering they paid $1.226 billion for the rights! You can also watch NBC and other official broadcasters’ video highlights on YouTube in more than 60 countries around the world, including the BBC (U.K.), America Movil (Latin America excluding Brazil), NHK (Japan) and many others.
Google will link all of these official broadcasters’ highlights directly into Google Search and YouTube Watch Cards for the Rio Games.
According to the YouTube Summer Games Report by the Google Trends team, the majority of time spent watching sports content happens on mobile. In the past 12 months, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Olympic sports videos global watch time.
Sports related content drives fans not just to YouTube, but to search as well. The Games are motivating more searches globally than the last World Cup and past two UEFA European Championships.
Brands on YouTube Tying into Rio Olympic Games
Brands are also heavily committed to the Rio Games, uploading ads celebrating the athletes, culture, and passion around the Olympic Games, and they are being watched in big numbers.
“From April 2016 through June 2016, ads from Worldwide and National Olympic Partners have already received the equivalent of over 400 years worth of watch time,” stated Heimes. “From epic wins to all-star performances, YouTube will bring you the best from Rio, before, during and after the Games through official broadcaster channels and celebration via content creators.”
“Even if you’re a world away, preview the places where the world’s most talented athletes will make history and explore the breathtaking beauty of Brazil,” said Livni. “We hope you’ll let Google be your guide.”
According to research by eMarketer, Facebook will receive 67.9% of all social media advertising revenue in 2016. The study predicts that Facebook will generate $22.37 billion in net ad revenues this year, up 30% from 2015 revenue of $17.08 billion. eMarketer says that 70% of this years revenue ($12.08 billion) will come from outside of the US.
“Facebook is seeing momentum across its ad business,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “On the branding side, video ads are becoming more and more popular for marketers whose objective is broad awareness. And products like Dynamic Ads, which let advertisers upload their product catalog to Facebook and then deliver relevant targeted ads, are proving highly effective for marketers that want to drive lower-funnel activities, such as purchases.”
eMarketer notes that this revenue growth is due entirely to ads on Facebook itself and that Facebook has not yet added monetization to Messenger, which it has been transitioning to a stand-alone app for the last couple of years. In June, Facebook announced that they mobile users would soon not be able to use Facebook Messenger without downloading the separate Messenger app.
Just last week, Facebook announced that Messenger is now being used by over 1 billion people, which matches the number of users that WhatsApp had as of February 2016, according to Statista.
“Messenger is gaining traction among marketers that want to experiment with chat bots,” said Williamson. “These are very early days for conducting business activities on Messenger, however, and it remains unclear just how important it will be as a marketing vehicle.”
Facebook has also not brought serious monetization to WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion in 2014, or to Instagram, which it paid $1 billion for in 2012.
It’s very likely that once Facebook finds a way to monetize WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram their social revenues will significantly accelerate.
Another significant source of future ad revenue for Facebook are video ads, which Facebook may actually see as its future primary source of revenue. At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London this past June, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
Mark Zuckerberg recently conducted the first live video conversation with ALL Facebook users. “A few weeks ago I started off trying to do an internal live Q&A and I found it was so much more fun and engaging and I could see peoples comments as I was going,” Zuckerberg told millions that were live watching. “So rather than just having a few hundred or a few thousand people in a room we could do this here and we could have tens or hundreds of thousands of people participating in a town hall Q&A together all across the world.”
Facebook knows that video is remarkably effective for brand marketing. Remember the Chewbacca Mom video? Well, you might not remember that was originally a Facebook Live video and benefited Kohl’s immensely. Facebook and all of its social and messaging platforms are ripe for video advertising, and when Facebook goes all in with video, even TV networks won’t be able to compete with both its reach and its ability to micro target audiences.
Googles Paul Muret, VP, Display, video & Analytics at Google, says that Google’s research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. If however, through optimization you can get your site to load within 5 seconds or less, Google estimates that you can earn twice as much revenue than those at the 19 second average.
“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”
A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”
AMP for Ads
Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”
At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.
AMP for Landing Pages
Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.
“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”
Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.
DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!
Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.
Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.
Programmatic Video
Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.
Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.
“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”
Outstream Video
Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”
Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.
VR & AR Ads
Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world.
“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.
TrueView Discovery Ads
A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.
Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.
They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.
With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”
The traditional television industry is finally feeling the pressure of the data rich micro-tuned digital advertising world of the internet and is hitting back with addressable advertising. For years advertisers have become accustomed to extreme targeting with website advertising and particularly with search advertising. Over the last few years micro targeted video ads have become the norm as video is quickly becoming mainstream on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This is causing a shift in ad spending from television to the internet that the TV industry is working to stop, or at least join in on.
The TV industry’s first step was to make viewing options available on all devices, often referred to as over-the-top (OTT) content viewing. This has been sped along by users, especially millennials and even younger teens watching more and more traditional television content on small internet connected devices. Additionally, smart TV’s are connected to the internet and more importantly are also being connected to smart cable boxes capable of serving the same kind of targeted ads that are served on the internet. This targeted advertising is called addressable advertising and it is the television industry’s competitive answer to the internet.
“One of the things we’re thinking about is whether TV channels go away and become apps,” Brian Hughes, senior vice president-audience analysis and practice lead at Magna, told MediaDailyNews during a preview of the report.
Hughes added that while the way consumers and industry practitioners think about television may be changing, its vitality as a medium remains as important as ever. It’s just becoming more complicated to track, understand and manage.
“The message you keep hearing from the industry is that TV is dead, but I think we’re finding that it’s a lot more complex than that. It’s the fact that OTT usage has exploded. TV is not, in fact, dead. It’s just changing. But it remains a central experience for most consumers and a vital medium for most advertisers,” he explained.
Asked what it’s changing into, Hughes said it’s part of the same meta theme that has been transforming much of the traditional media marketplace: a shift to an “on-demand world, where content is at your fingertips and you can get it where you are on the devices you are on.”
With addressable advertising advertisers will be able to target diapers in a video commercial to a stay-at-home-dad watching ESPN on either his mobile device or even on his home TV, while others watching the same live or recorded show will see different commercials based on their own demographic, sociographic and behavioral data. No longer will all men be shown shaving and truck commercials.
Big data is being collected and utilized by companies such as Google’s DoubleClick to make addressable advertising possible enabling the merging of traditional television viewing with the viewing of that same content on small devices to serve targeted adverting.
“Advertisers and programmers who embrace the fundamental shift from a “big game” mentality to one of reaching viewers across many screens and devices will be rewarded with up-to-the-minute flexibility, deeper audience insights and much more dependable ROI data,” according to a recent report by the DoubleClick the Marketing Team and posted by Anish Kattukaran. “With much more granular attribution and measurement, advertisers can now understand the true performance of their ad–including engagement, brand lift, and conversions. Addressable advertising creates value for everyone in the advertising chain. This lets marketers reach and attribute highly specific targets, and helps broadcasters and distributors better value their content and monetize multiple audiences at the same time. It also give the viewers themselves a better experience, with ads that are more interesting and relevant to them.”
Advertisers can still advertise to the masses, such as in the Super Bowl, but will also have the option of using granular data attribution to reach subsegments of the audience that are more likely to be interested in their offer. This is both a benefit and a challenge to the television industry because targeted advertising will bring higher CPM’s but with this new data advertisers will also be able to track conversions (sales) and know whether their ads are working or not. This is something traditional TV has not had to deal with and has been a huge frustration to the internet advertising industry because they have had to work with advertisers on this extreme tracking for years, while watch ad dollars go to TV which didn’t have to prove out their value. Addressable advertising is leveling the playing field.
True conversion reporting for television and television content across all devices is the holy grail for advertisers because it lets them target ad dollars much more effectively.
“Advertisers and programmers who embrace the fundamental shift from a “big game” mentality to one of reaching viewers across many screens and devices will be rewarded with up-to-the-minute flexibility, deeper audience insights and much more dependable ROI data,” says Kattukaran. “With much more granular attribution and measurement, advertisers can now understand the true performance of their ad–including engagement, brand lift, and conversions.”
A document reviewed by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook is going to pay $50 million to 140 publishers and celebrities that agreed to post Facebook Live videos. The publishers and celebrities will also be promoting their videos on their sites, Facebook and other social media channels.
This is a marketing strategy to launch Facebook Live as the place to post live videos thus changing the dynamic of the news feed from your friends text posts and pictures to television like entertainment and information. Facebook sees video as its future, both in terms of the type of content that users post and consume and as where they see the bulk of their future revenue coming. Just last week a Facebook VP stated in an interview that she predicts that within five years Facebook will be “all video.”
Facebook has long predicted that video advertising will eventually be their main source of revenue with Mark Zuckerberg once saying that if they sold a video ad at the top of the Facebook news feed for $1 million it would be equivalent to three Super Bowls every day.
Early this year, Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook will evolve to be a video platform commenting, “Most of the content 10 years ago was text, and then photos, and now it’s quickly becoming videos,” Zuckerberg said. “I just think that we’re going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.”
Just last week Zuckerberg hosted its first Facebook Live Q&A to all Facebook users, at one point reaching 6 million concurrent viewers.
The contracts to pay popular sites and celebrities is a way to launch Facebook Live while it works out a share of revenue concept. YouTube typically pays out 70% of revenue but pays even more for certain premium content. Its Facebook Live partners include a wide variety of publishers, celebrities and sports starts such as NFL quarterback Russell Wilson, CNN, Kevin Hart, Vox, Mashable, Tastemade, New York Times, Gordon Ramsay, Deepak Chopra and the Huffington Post.
Via WSJ.com:
“We wanted to invite a broad set of partners so we could get feedback from a variety of different organizations about what works and what doesn’t,” Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations and media partnerships, said in a statement.
The value of individual contracts varies widely, with 17 worth more than $1 million, according to the document. The highest-paid publisher is BuzzFeed, slated to receive $3.05 million for broadcasting live between March 2016 and March 2017. Just behind BuzzFeed is the New York Times, which is to receive $3.03 million for a 12-month deal. CNN is third, with a $2.5 million contract.
YouTube today introduced a suite of tools for business of all sizes to make video ads. At launch, YouTube Director includes three main tools that let’s businesses, especially small businesses, make video ads with a professional look and feel.
The first tool allows you to create a YouTube video ad right from your phone. To try it out simply download the free YouTube Director for Business app which is available on the iPhone in the U.S. and Canada with an Android version coming soon. The app is designed for the non-techie… so go for it! Another perk for small businesses is that they can use the app to create a video without any obligation to run paid ads on YouTube. Just make the video, upload it and promote it on your small business website, on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
To prove that anyone can make a professional looking video ad YouTube provided the example of Woody Lovell Jr., owner of The Barbershop Club in Los Angeles. Woody created his own video ad in less than 20 minutes and ran a campaign on YouTube promoting his business. Woody said that the campaign is already seeing positive results.
Youtube invited The Barbershop Club and four other businesses to take part in the YouTube Director Video Challenge. They asked each owner to make a video about their business, film it, edit it and put it on YouTube in 20 minutes or less!
First, they were asked to create a video ad without this new tool. They did it but it wasn’t easy. Using YouTube Director Video they were all able to create great videos in under 20 minutes using YouTube Director and couldn’t praise it enough.
“It’s perfect, a lot easier and so easy,” commented the business owners. “It’s like a big budget. It’s so much better and it walked you through it giving you tips. One, two, three, four… it was as easy as ABC! It was designed well. An instant commercial. The app worked as the director. It cost nothing and it’s so easy and you can just publish it.
Here’s the video made by the Pink Family of the world famous Pink’s Hot Dogs in Hollywood, California. I’ve been to this place and it’s great and you can get a vegan dog too. Keep your eyes open because this is a popular celebrity hangout!
Woody did a great job making The Barbershop Club video. It really has a professional feel. The Barbershop Club is based in Los Angeles at the Original Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax, which opened in July 1934. As Woody says about his shop, “It is where young men come learn the ways of manhood, men come to talk with ease and both are made to look like true gentleman when they leave.” Couldn’t have said it better!
Chef Roberto Martin of eLOVate Kitchen produced the video below. eLOVate is a vegan restaurant in Santa Monica, California, one of my favorite cities, and as a vegan I’ll be trying this place out! I guarantee you, non-vegans will like it too.
Here’s the video ad made by Sarah Wolfgang of The Dog Cafe. Sarah started an interesting new concept of dog adoption making The Dog Cafe a gathering spot for dog lovers to meet and mingle with each other over a latte and with rescue dogs looking for loving homes. Way to go Sarah!
Nadia Geller of Nadia Geller Market created a nice video ad in just 20 minutes! Nadia Geller Market is located in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles that carries home products with a tongue in cheek vibe. It’s part of a larger business Nadia owns called Nadia Geller Designs which is an upscale interior design firm. Nadia is somewhat more sophisticated in marketing than the other businesses YouTube chose to highlight in this product launch.
YouTube also announced a service called YouTube Director Onsite, where YouTube actually will send a professional videographer to shoot and edit a video ad for any business that spends a minimum of $150 advertising. That is an incredible deal and a great way for small businesses to get started with video advertising. YouTube Director Onsite is launching in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C.—and coming to more cities soon.
For businesses that are integrated in mobile apps, YouTube also announced YouTube Director Automated Video where YouTube will create a video ad from existing creative found in your business app such as logos and app screenshots already uploaded to the app store. This is available worldwide. YouTube is asking that you call one of their experts (1-855-500-2756) to try out this service.
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
“I think that’s also because it helps us edit,” added Mendelsohn. “You talk with your business about how this is an era of storytelling. The best way to tell stories in this world where so much information is coming at us actually is video. It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trends help us to digest more of the information in a quicker way.”
Pattie Sellers, Assistant Managing Editor of Fortune Magazine who interviewed Mendelsohn remarked, “I don’t want writers to go out of business though!” Mendelsohn had the perfect retort, “You have to write for the video!”.
YouTube is arguably the most disruptive marketing platform of this decade. Yes, it’s been around since 2005, but only in the last few years is it starting to impact Madison Avenue marketing campaigns. Companies are using YouTube to put their brands in front of hard-to-reach niche viewers and are also finding ways to creatively make their own videos to spread their marketing message and enhance their image.
If you are the marketing director of a Fortune 2000 company or are an entrepreneur starting a small business you should dive into YouTube and video in general and learn how it can be an effective marketing tool for you or your brand.
Recently, some video gamers on the YouTube platform and part of the Youtube Creator Academy made a short video offering some advice on how to build a unique audience. This is from gamers perspective, but I think you will find the tips useful no matter what industry you are in.
“I built a community by being a really family friendly channel,” said Zach Letter of Aviator Gaming. “I do mostly story based content in Minecraft. I like to consider my channel the soap opera of the Minecraft world so that kids come to watch an in-depth story that has some drama, has some romance and has that tension they deal with everyday at school or in their real life. I think that is how I built such a tight
-nit community that loves my scripting, loves my role play but also loves me.”
Letter commented, “When I try to engage my audience I use a lot of the YouTube tools but I also use parts of my voice. I will try to engage them for likes and comments, just to see where they’re at in a certain series.” For instance Letter might ask, “What do you thinks going to happen next in the plot?” “That actually inspires me to write certain things in the script. If a lot of people want this certain thing to happen I might go back in and change the script and change up the episode. I think it’s alway smart to engage comments especially when it’s related to your content because it allows you to tailor content that your viewers actually want to see.”
“Whether it’s submissions on social media or in the comments sections they let me know that, hey, we really want to play this game, or hey, try out this game that’s coming out,” commented Garrett Sutton of JoblessGarrett. “Staying up on the trends and hype trains in regards to new releases of games really helps a child’s world as well.”
“For us it’s hard, because our main body of the episodes are very heavily scripted, but we use the intro paragraphs, we use the end cards as ways to actually communicate with the fans.” Matthew Patrick of The Game Theorists said. “People have been asking for us to cover films, TV and anime for a really long time, so Film Theory, the Channel, made a lot of sense. Hey, it would be really cool to see you play games and see what you do in real life, so the live stream happened.”
Patrick added, “First off the way they behave on camera will really dictate the way their fans behave. If you are responding to haters all the time those are going to tend to filter up in the comments, whereas if you are responding to that thoughtful comment, it shows that you as a creator is active in that community and is someone who is listening and is excited to engage.”
McDonald’s, in celebration of National Hamburger Day this Saturday, tested the marketing potential of live video on Facebook. McDonald’s first promoted it’s Facebook Live video to its nearly 65 million Facebook followers with 2 separate posts starting Wednesday afternoon. Clearly, McDonald’s was going for humor, but the artist featured in the promo and live video is absolutely creepy in his attempt at channelling his inner Bob Ross. It is funny and worth watching!
McDonald’s idea was to have it look like a Bob Ross style artist painted 3 hamburger related pictures in real-time on Facebook Live in celebration of National Hamburger Day. The person playing the Bob Ross character was actor/comedian “Bevin”.
Here is how McDonald’s promoted it’s Facebook Live video:
Here are the video’s that ran live on McDonald’s Facebook page. For some reason the live video was recorded as 2 separate clips:
The opening 8 minute clip had close to 8,000 views, 683 likes, 281 shares and 408 comments as of this writing. This was followed by a 42 minute clip which had nearly 20,000 views, 1,500 likes, 160 shares and 2,118 comments. This is only mildly successful considering that McDonald’s has 65 million followers.
A couple funny reactions to the Facebook Live video in the comments:
I give credit for McDonald’s going out of box in testing Facebook Live for marketing its product and using humor was a good idea.
However, Facebook needs to let brands reach more of their followers with their posts! People “like” brands because they want their posts to appear in their news feeds. Why Facebook, in the interest of decluttering people’s news feeds takes it upon themselves to only show a fraction of the posts from people and brands that people themselves chose to follow is beyond reason. With 65 million followers of McDonald’s on Facebook the Live videos should have been seen by millions.
A better approach for Facebook, in my opinion, would be to give people options themselves to prioritizing people and brands as they see their posts. Let people choose and allow brands that have worked so hard and spent so much money on promoting their Facebook pages and growing their followers benefit from this.
According To TechCrunch you will soon be able to broadcast videos, not just for their current 90 minute limit, but continuously. This could revolutionize bar cams, beach cams and street cams! At launch, the continuous feed feature will only be live and will not be archivable. Nonstop Facebook video will be available via their Continuous Live Video API.
Facebook recently made traditional Facebook Live videos re-watchable with a permanent link, similar to YouTube videos.
Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo told TechCrunch writer Josh Constine, “We’ve already seen some interesting use cases – for example, it was used by explore.org to power nature cameras — and we’re looking forward to seeing what Live API developers come up with in the future. We expect developers and publishers to get creative with this new capability.” Check out Explore.org’s Facebook Page here.
Facebook Continuous Live Video will have all the rest of the features that Facebook Live currently has. These include geogating to target specific locations or exclude certain locations and age-gating to restrict video views to certain ages. Via the API sites can now take and process videos through professional cameras and video broadcasting systems as well.
Facebook is rapidly surpassing the features of Twitters Periscope and is taking on YouTube for video supremacy. Facebook clearly sees video as its primary revenue source of the future with TV like ad buys from companies looking to reach highly targeted or extreme mass audiences.
What is the appropriate way to compare the audiences of an online video series and a television series? This controversy can also be called… The Upfronts vs. the Newfronts!
The Upfronts is where ad agencies on behalf of advertisers buy TV ads in bulk and also get presented with pitches by the various networks. The Upfronts have been around since 1962. The Newfronts are the digital equivalent, mostly featuring premium online content such as made for YouTube professionally produced series. The Newfronts have been gaining steam over the last few years but actually began in 2008. The Newfronts and Upfronts were just held back to back in New York City.
What’s provoking jabs by TV execs such as CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, is that it’s becoming clear that the Newfronts and Upfronts are competing for the same ad dollars. The budgets from advertisers of premium online digital video is coming out of the original budgets for TV commercials. For instance, ad agency Magna Global announced at the Newfronts that they are shifting $250 million from TV to digital in 2016.
At an Upfront breakfast speech, Moonves told the audience, “When it comes to digital, “The bloom is off the rose and the lack of effect of digital advertising are “absolutely true.” According to Adweek he put it this way:
As for other networks highlighting their success in specific demographics during upfronts, Moonves noted, “different people brag about statistics that they just made up last week.”
Moonves joined the chorus of broadcasters who are swinging back this week at the debatable claims coming from digital companies. “There’s a lot of stats that aren’t true,” said Moonves. “We see [ad] money coming back to the network. The bloom is off the rose [for digital].”
The Wall Street Journal Thursday added fuel to the fire by questioning a comparison of the audience size of the TV show “Pretty Little Liars” and the YouTube show “How to Survive High School”. At the Newfronts Fullscreen said that the online show, “How to Survive High School” has amassed 36 million views since it launched last year, while in comparison “Pretty Little Liars” had 2 million viewers. This is a weak statistic, but it’s meant to illustrate the growing reach of premium online video content, not that the YouTube show is actually more popular than “Liars.” Per WSJ “Pretty Little Liars” has been averaging 2.5 million viewers an episode since January based on seven days of live and recorded viewing.
Statistically it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison because the TV show has 2.5 million viewers every week while the web video show had 36 million views over the course of its existence. But at least those numbers are indisputable, while TV viewing is still relying on Nielsen estimates that are extrapolated from diaries and homes that installed their box.
Another argument was made by a TV advertising trade group:
Via WSJ — “Sean Cunningham, chief executive of the Video Advertising Bureau, a TV-led trade group that has been making the argument that digital outlets are overstating their audiences, said that with Fullscreen’s comparison, “the basic media math falls apart here in every way.”
The VAB made the case that a better way to compare a Web video show with a TV show is to calculate the average audience at a given minute for both shows. The group found that since last August “Pretty Little Liars” averaged over 1.6 million viewers watching live at any given minute when on the air, while “How to Survive” averaged just 850 individual viewers during a given minute.”
That way of comparison is silly and starts to make the hyperbole of online video proponents look sane. Not a good idea if you really want to make the case that online video views are overstated.
By its nature TV shows are mostly viewed live or after being recorded while online video is viewed over a much longer period of time and the period of time right after they are uploaded is irrelevant. Measuring the audience of an online video at a given point in time instead of overall may apply to TV somewhat but obviously way understates the viewing audience of online video. “How to Survive High School” had 36 million views! That is in NFL playoff territory.
Are they all unique? No. But so what? TV viewership is not unique over a multi-week period of time and TV execs don’t seem to have a problem with that. They charge advertisers based on their total viewership for the episode, even if the advertiser is advertising every week where there is substantial overlap in their viewers over time.
Another aspect rarely noted is that digital ads are viewed preroll and cannot be bypassed, whereas TV ads are routinely fast-forwarded through or ignored (bathroom break!) and this is true of the younger age brackets especially. Of course with digital, unlike TV, there is usually only one ad per episode, but that’s likely to change over time.
The point is that online digital is catching and likely surpassing the viewership of traditional TV viewership and it is freaking TV execs out!
Amazon today announced the launch of Amazon Video Direct (AVD), a head-to-head competitor with Google’s YouTube platform. Amazon touts it as a service that gives video providers a self-service way to reach Amazon’s huge customer base including the coveted Prime members. Individual creators and professional video story tellers can earn royalties based on hours streamed, videos rented or purchased and subscriptions.
What’s interesting is that videos uploaded as part of AVD will be available to consumers via Amazon Video where there is also unique series content, movies, TV shows and Showtime and Starz programming. AVD is clearly a big part of Amazon’s strategy to be the epicenter of Internet TV where cable and satellite middlemen are replaced.
Video providers, both professional and amateur, can have their videos included in Prime Video at no charge to Prime members, available as an add-on subscription, offered as a one-time rental or purchase or make them available to all Amazon customers with ads. If a video producer chooses the ad-supported option Amazon will give the provider 55% of the revenue which is the same as YouTube. For purchases, rentals and subscription AVD will split revenue 50-50 and for videos provided free to Prime members Amazon will pay $.15 per streaming hour topping out at $75K per year.
“It’s an amazing time to be a content creator,” said Jim Freeman, Vice President of Amazon Video. “There are more options for distribution than ever before and with Amazon Video Direct, for the first time, there’s a self-service option for video providers to get their content into a premium streaming subscription service. We’re excited to make it even easier for content creators to find an audience, and for that audience to find great content.”
In order to attract the best talent from YouTube and other video platforms Amazon is creating a $1 million monthly fund that will be used to distribute bonuses for producing the most watched videos above what video makers will already earn on the platform. Amazon is calling it the AVD Stars Program. This is designed to steal YouTube celebrities and will lead to bidding wars for today’s video stars.
Launch partners include: Conde Nast Entertainment, HowStuffWorks, Samuel Goldwyn Films, The Guardian, Mashable, Mattel, StyleHaul, Kin Community, Jash, Business Insider, Machinima, TYT Network, Baby Einstein, CJ Entertainment America, Xive TV, Synergetic Distribution, Kino Nation, Journeyman Pictures, and Pro Guitar Lessons. Their content is now available on Amazon Video.
YouTube announced at the Digital Content NewFronts a new product enabling brands to advertise on its fastest-rising videos. The product, called Breakout Videos, identifies videos as they begin to go viral and then along with other viral videos allows advertisers to place their video ads within them. The idea is that many brands want their products to be perceived as cutting edge or cool and their association with viral videos helps them achieve this.
Breakout Videos is part of Google Preferred which allows advertisers to reach the top 5% of videos created by YouTube stars. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated, “This will allow marketers to feature their brands alongside the next big thing”.
At the NewFronts YouTube brought out over 100 of the top YouTube stars and also announced Sesame Studios, a new channel from Sesame Street.
Big Bird also made an appearance to unveil Sesame Studios, a new YouTube kids channel from the creators of Sesame Street.
Magna Global, which buys ads for Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Fiat and others announced at NewFront that they have agreed to buy $250 million in video ads from YouTube.
But that’s not the story, it’s that Magna is shifting these ad dollars from its clients TV budgets.
This shift is something that has been predicted for a while and it may finally be happening as the reach and capability of online video has matured, especially on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has famously pointed out, its audience size is the equivalent of three Super Bowls happening every day.
Per the Wall Street Journal, David Cohen, president of Magna Global North America commented, “We have negotiated a meaningful share shift from linear television to digital video”.
That’s big news and could be the beginning of a trend that should raise the hairs on every TV ad executives neck. Online video already has the reach and eyeballs, it has the data on behavior and often can target based on specific individualized information such as job title, location, income and what products and services a person has been looking at buying. This is something that TV can’t currently offer, but they are working on that capability via internet connected TV’s. Unfortunately for them, the television based ad platforms connected to the internet and therefore the data are years from mainstream adoption and implementation.
Online video on the other hand… has that data now.
About a year ago Instagram launched static ad carousels and now today they’ve announced video ad carousels. Now the carousels can show up to 60 second video clips or a mix of video and static ads.
Similar to it’s mother ship Facebook, Instagram is acutely focused on video as its primary revenue source of the future. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg has often compared the power of Facebook video (and now Instagram video?) as potentially a medium that could offer Super Bowl like ad views… EVERY DAY.
Here’s a sample of the new Instagram Video Ad Carousel:
In the era of Snapchat, which is the primary communication platform of millennials, Instagram is promoting a similar concept that advertisers can use to reach their target audiences.
The study was conducted based on a survey of 305 buy-side professionals, who largely expect that greater investment in digital video will come from overall rising ad budgets this year and as funds shift away from broadcast and cable TV. 67% said they anticipate their broadcast and cable TV ad spend to stay the same or decrease in the next year.
67% also believe that original digital video will become as important as original TV programming within the next 3 to 5 years.
Across the automotive, CPG, financial services, retail, and telecommunications categories, advertisers expect to spend more on digital video. 67% expect to move a portion of spend out of TV to do so. CPG, financial services, and telecommunications marketers expect the biggest impact to be on their cable TV budgets. 63% in the automotive category expect to get the funding from expanding budgets.
“This study demonstrates unequivocally that digital video is a fierce competitor for advertising dollars,” said Sherrill Mane, SVP, Research, Analytics, and Measurement at the IAB.
A separate study from Visible Measures is out, which looks at video campaigns on Facebook and YouTube. It finds that “alternative video platforms” like Facebook have become more important to brands and that Facebook has not only grown “tremendously” for total viewing, but that it’s also now the most powerful tool for driving immediate growth in viewership for timely video content.
That study found that for brands that post their campaigns on both Facebook and YouTube, Facebook dominates viewership immediately following a campaign’s release. For the campaigns it looked at in March, Facebook reached 85 percent of its viewership in the first week after launch, while YouTube only reached 63 percent of its viewership during that time. But don’t let that fool you. It also found that YouTube still dominates reach in the long run. It just takes longer.
They credit both YouTube’s functionality and consumer behavior for making YouTube more effective in the long term. According to Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin, the decrease in Facebook’s share of viewership over the course of time highlights how differently Facebook and YouTube function for both consumers and brands.
“If something is hot and of the moment, such as a newly released campaign, the Super Bowl, or even a cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook and similar social media sites are incredibly effective for driving the spread of timely content due to the trending nature of the News Feed,” he said. “But the strength of Facebook to promote trending content also highlights how powerful YouTube remains as a platform for continued viewership.”
“Content discovery on Facebook is very much dependent on the Facebook News Feed, which is a function of what a user’s friends are sharing, as well as recommendations based on trends and a user’s interests. Because discovery is so dependent on sharing, viewership soon after content gets hot’ is strongest on Facebook,” says Visible Measures. “Conversely, YouTube acts as a depository for video and millions of users go there first, or arrive via Google search, to find video content. This user paradigm enables videos to have a much longer shelf-life on YouTube.”
“While Facebook can be counted on for viral lift, if your video doesn’t ‘pop’ on Facebook it will vanish pretty quickly, whereas slow and steady evergreen content can pay dividends for a long time on YouTube,” marketing consultant Brian Honigman told us in January.
According to Shin, Facebook will have to amp up its video discovery and search options if it wants to compete with YouTube for the long term.
“If you think about the overall web, there’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide,” he said. “But a lot of what we can get at are recommendations on products and travel and restaurants and things that your friends have shared, they haven’t shared publicly, and knowing different correlations, or interesting things about what your friends are interested in, and that’s the type of stuff, those are questions that we can answer that no one else can answer, and that’s probably going to be what we continue to focus on doing first. And I think what you’re seeing is that as we enable more use cases and as we just get a lot of the basics right around performance and bringing the mobile features into parity and beyond what we’ve been able to do on desktop, the volume is growing quickly.”
Though he wasn’t talking specifically about video with regard to search, the huge increase in video sharing on Facebook will only add pressure on Facebook to handle video search better. Right now, Facebook’s search feature doesn’t even include a video option. That definitely needs to change, and I have no doubt that it will in time.
Facebook has been testing some functionality, which could help in the discoverability department. It’s trying a feature that automatically plays another video once the one the user is currently watching ends. This is something YouTube started doing a while back.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that video on the social network had increased 75% over the past year. Socialbakers, at the time, found that for the first time, brands were sharing Facebook videos on the social network more than YouTube videos. And with good reason. Facebook is said to give more weight to native videos in News Feed ranking.
Socialbakers also recently found that Facebook video tends to get better organic reach than regular status updates, links, or photos.
“The real growth point today is in videos,” it said. “While they are relatively more promoted than photos – 27% of all videos are promoted, compared to 17% of photos – there are so many more photos than videos that the new format is still far more effective at reaching audiences.”
Facebook expects video specifically to bring it more mobile ad dollars.
“Looking ahead, we believe video will play a significant role in bringing more marketers to mobile,” said COO Sheryl Sandberg during the earnings call. “More than 75% of global video views on Facebook occur on mobile – and we believe mobile video will become more important to marketers over time.”
Asked about video ad pricing, CFO David Wehner said, ”Video is effectively winning in the auction if it’s higher priced. So if somebody’s willing to pay more for a video, it’s going to get served before another type of format ad. But there’s not really a price differential you’re paying for a video, it’s just what are you willing to pay into the system. So there’s not differential pricing by product, it’s just what are you willing to bid for the format that you want to show to the people that you want to show it to and that’s how the system works.”
Last week, Facebook announced the launch of Anthology, a new marketing program that gives brands access to a group of well-known video publishers to improve the quality of video ads.
