A report appeared recently that made me happy, optimistic and a little proud of our industry, all at the same time.
The recently published Web TV Enterprises report had a lot of positive messages in it, perhaps most importantly from media buyers about the increased money they’re prepared to spend on online video.
When I see the sort of figures mentioned I can’t help feeling that our little industry is really is growing up.
However, what really hammered home this feeling of maturity was a statistic hidden deep in the bowels of the report, showing that 53% of the 160 responding buyers mentioned incremental reach to TV as their main reason for investment in video.
From our point of view there is nothing surprising about this development.
Over the last couple of years we’ve witnessed users shifting in droves to consume video online, both in the form of dedicated web content and now increasingly as time-shifted TV. The interesting change is that this ever increasing hyper-fragmentation now seems to have really started moving considerable budgets.
There is no doubt we still have a long way to go as an industry before we’ve caught up to the behaviour of users (online video spend is still way behind time spend by users), but one of the challenges for the industry so far has been cold proof.
Every media channel is built upon a body of research, and as a maturing industry we are still lacking solid numbers on effect - mostly because budgets are still too small to justify the kind of studies conducted in other channels.
However, , a joint initiative between GfK NOP and Kantar Worldpanel, has given us some of just that.
The study showed that online video delivered a 14.5% incremental reach to TV while nearly two out of three people who saw the ads online didn’t even see them on TV. It gets even better…
The study showed how online video had delivered £3.71 per £1 spent. That is not just more than the miserable £0.60 TV delivered, but also close to a 100% higher ROI than the £2 other online channels returned.
All this is good news - both for us in the industry and for our clients. Incremental reach and return on investment are two of the most solid indicators of a successful medium in the making.
However, here at Goviral we believe it is important that we continue to see the developments in online video for what they really are, not just as a short-term opportunity for incremental reach or excellent return on investment.
Digitalizing video and bringing it online on a large scale, as is happening right now, will over time create a much more fundamental change in the way we as consumers expect to be able to experience content.
The video world in 3-5 years will be on demand, anywhere, anytime and always on - putting the consumer firmly in control.
This in return will force brands to see themselves more and more like media companies, producing and distributing content in order to be connected and relevant to consumers who can choose between an almost endless pool of content.
The winners will obviously be the brands that get both content and media right.
The one side making sure the brand speaks the language of their audience, the other that the message doesn’t drown in the sea of clutter popularly called Youtube.
Contagious hit it spot on in the headline paragraph of their Most Contagious 2010 publication:
Or in other words - In 2010, the smartest brands realised that the model is not really 360, it's 365.