Online Video - The Holy Grail Of Brand Advertising

There's a great range of content video out there, so much across the whole web, actually. No matter which site you go on, it's very hard not to see a video content these days, so there's a real opportunity here for brands to get into this. What is online video? Well, online video can be used for brand building activity - very great there is this is a brand building channel - interactive engagement and direct response.

Interactive engagement and direct response are slightly different in that interactive engagement sits more toward the brand building, so you can engage through the video without actually necessarily getting a response from it. So, it's just actually adding to the relationship with the video and its ready consumer. In direct response, actually, there are now instances where you can make purchases within the video played and look at different product and then get a response from people or sign up to the email list.

It's really interesting from the more interactive side. According to comScore, 35.1 million total of unique users in the UK and that was from September last year so actually that number is probably slightly higher now, 6.

65 billion videos watched every month and 561.7 million hours, so it all stops there, but what this means is that a lot of videos are watched by a lot of people. What that resulted in is just an incredible broad story from online video advertising, so the IAB plausibly measures the exact money spent in all forms of online advertising.

And two and a half years ago, so the first half of 2008, we started measuring pre and post roll advertising, so there aren't much of advertising but we started measuring that one, and you can this here, it shot up from few years ago. This market didn't even exist to a 20.1 million pound medium for the first half of 2010 alone and what's really interesting with this and the story that would come out as we go on further is that 2010 seems to be the testing period.

So, a lot of those stories I'm hearing from brands and agencies I speak to, was to test campaigns done by the advertisers last year and 2011, they're campaigns have worked and there are amounts spent quite a lot, so doubling, if not more, the amount of money just spending on online videos. So, this is a fantastic story already. This is just a start and looking into the future, we fully expect this to boom over the next couple of years.

So 2011, I think, is the year that people will actually start to invest, speaking about the amounts of money. It's not just testing anymore, it's actually the doing. So, advertising, where is best to place it? Well, this is a study that we did.

This study was just on the short form content, so we're not looking at the longer TV programming or films. What we found actually is viewers are more accepting of advertising with quality content and they are more tolerant now, I think, because there's probably more video advertising than last year. People are starting to realize the pay-off they get from free content and they just watch it for a short time and so I think this perception that you can do advertising around short form content is not true, it just means that by thinking about it beforehand and thinking about placing the right touch around that content, it's making it really relevant, really appropriate, that you can make it accessible to the consumer.

This is another slide from our Sky and IAB research, what's interesting here is that there's reinforcement of the fact these videos are branding medium. People, when they see it now, they don't make video purchases necessarily, some do from online video, but it's just delayed reaction, so delayed purchase, delayed investigation, so actually, it could be a week, two weeks, after they have seen an online video ad. But they're actually taking actions.

That's really important in a lot of ways. That doesn't sound like obvious when you actually say it but the video isn't necessarily a di