How the changing face of advertising is driving innovation in video, and beyond
Scott Button, founder and CEO, Unruly, will be one the speakers at FIPP’s Innovation Forum on 26-27 June in London, sharing insights in a session dedicated to video advertising.
We asked Button for his thoughts on developments in advertising (video, programmatic and native), big data and how Unruly is innovating around it, and content and real-time marketing.
According to Button, “the macro-trend towards content marketing and real-time marketing has massively shaken up advertisers’ marketing strategies, with more brands becoming newsrooms for their niche. It will lead to greater investment in content discovery, content curation and content creation as brands vie with each other for consumers’ share of mind on social platforms. Brands will need a bigger toolkit, which allows them to spot which content is trending (news stories, images and videos) and respond quickly.”
At the Innovation Forum, he will share some insights on how Unruly is innovating around to exploit such trends, and more specifically in the area of video advertising.
About the FIPP Innovation Forum
The FIPP Innovation Forum builds on five years’ research into media innovations worldwide, culminating each year in FIPP’s Innovations in Magazine Media World Report, led by Innovation Media Consulting experts Juan Senor and John Wilpers.
The Forum in London will bring innovations from the past year – from the 2014 report and beyond – to life, offering attendees an opportunity to:
- Immerse themselves in the world of innovation
- Engage with expert speakers and international colleagues
- Come away with practical, actionable insights and ideas in their businesses back home
Remember, places will be limited to ensure an exclusive, intimate experience between speakers and audience, and audience members themselves.
Q&A with Scott Button
How is the relationship between video and advertisers/brands fuelling innovation in the industry?
Videos are emotionally engaging and easy to share. And it’s not just user-generated clips and music videos that are being shared. Over the past 12 months the sharing of branded video has increased by almost a quarter (22 per cent), as more and more consumers are engaging with branded content (source: Unruly Viral Video Chart).
The potential for video advertising is huge. In fact, digital video ad spend is set to reach US$22.5bn by 2017, up from $8.3bn in 2013 (source: Magna Global). Bigger spend means that better ads are being produced, but it also means advertisers are experimenting with the formats they use to get their videos watched, tracked and shared online.
The speed of sharing has doubled over the past 12 months. In April 2013, Unruly found that a quarter of the average online branded video’s shares occurred in the first three days of its launch. Twelve months later, that number has almost doubled — to 42 per cent, making the first few days even more crucial for marketers hoping to make their ads the talk of the web.
What other innovations around video really excite you right now?
The video ecosystem is a really exciting space right now. With 74.1 per cent of video views now happening outside of YouTube and its player (source: comScore Video Metrix, January 2014), there have never been more places for consumers to discover, watch and share videos.
The introduction of premium video ads on Facebook in March, as well as the explosion of short-form content platforms such as Vine and Instagram, means there’s more choice for advertisers wishing to engage their audience and amplify their video content.
This proliferation of social networks and short-form platforms, as well as the millions of sites across the Open Web, where brands can promote their video content, offers a lot of choice for consumers. And where there’s choice, innovation will follow.
Away from video specifically, what other trends are we seeing around advertising?
The macro-trend towards content marketing and real-time marketing has massively shaken up advertisers’ marketing strategies, with more brands becoming newsrooms for their niche. It will lead to greater investment in content discovery, content curation and content creation as brands vie with each other for consumers’ share of mind on social platforms. Brands will need a bigger toolkit, which allows them to spot which content is trending (news stories, images and videos) and respond quickly.
The programmatic market is also a big trend in advertising. It hit $12bn in 2013 and Magna Global has projected that it will leap to $32.6bn by 2017. Programmatic benefits advertisers, offering them more choice across a fragmented media landscape and better targeting to reach and engage consumers. This will be driven by new technologies which make use of big data to pinpoint viewers at scale based on what they’re in the market to purchase, how old they are and even what car they drive.
With content being created at the speed of social, programmatic also offers the perfect distribution option for agile-marketing strategies, allowing advertisers to launch a new campaign to reach their target audiences in seconds.
What is Unruly doing around this?
For brands’ agile-marketing strategies, Unruly has developed Unruly Analytics, a cloud-hosted social analytics dashboard that allows advertisers to spot what videos are trending among their target audience in real-time.
In terms of big data, Unruly has developed a ground-breaking tool which helps drive actionable insight – Unruly ShareRank. It combines analysis of big data with human responses and insight to predict the shareability of videos, before they are launched.
We’ve also recently entered the programmatic ecosystem with our in-stream social skippables format. We have integrations with 60+ Data Management Platforms to offer online and offline behavioural targeting.
How can magazines and traditional magazine publishers innovate to survive/thrive/compete?
With more marketers embracing their roles as content creators and publishers looking to revitalise revenue streams, it’s no surprise that native advertising is a hot trend right now.
But native advertising needs to prove that it is a lot more than just the latest buzzword in digital advertising. Sure, it faces some tough challenges if it’s to make it through its troublesome teenage years. These include issues over its transparency and scalability, and as more and more marketers look to boost their mobile spend, the question remains over whether users on smartphone and tablet devices will be willing to tolerate more ads in their mobile newsfeeds. However, there’s no reason to suggest it won’t overcome these challenges.
In the months to come, how advertisers gauge the success of native ads will also change.
According to a survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association in 2013, time spent and engagement were the most important metrics to marketers. But as the market matures in 2014, there will be a greater need to focus on ROI of this fast-developing format.
About the FIPP Innovation Forum
Date: 26-27 June 2014
Venue: Microsoft Offices, London
Website: www.fippinnovation.com
Speakers (with more to come)
Contact Claire Jones and/or Natalie Butcher for more information about the event.
