Mobile Video Ads: Considerations for Your Campaign
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Ever since DVRs became common in many American homes, advertisers have become frustrated with viewers skipping their high-dollar television advertisements. Now it seems that marketers are increasingly moving their ad dollars out of TV and into mobile video ads.
According to BrightRoll (who were recently acquired by Yahoo), US television ad spending in 2012 was $3.88 billion while digital video ad spending was less than a quarter of that at $.89 billion. Cut to two years later and digital video spending is catching up with $1.76 billion to TV’s $2.19 billion.
As many advertisers have learned, there is more to mobile video ads than simply porting spots produced for television onto smaller screens. There are several things marketers should consider in the world of mobile videos.
What Videos Sell
Just like traditional television commercials, mobile video ads attract certain advertisers and work best for certain campaigns. According to Opera Mediaworks, over a fifth of mobile video produced were used to advertise entertainment products. Coming in second with 18% was consumer packaged goods followed by financial services with 13%. Somewhat ironically the smallest vertical represented was mobile phone services which tied retail at only 3%.
Video Lengths
One of the hardest decisions marketers have to make with mobile video is determining the length of their advertisement. While some apps like Vine and Instagram have time restraints, others allow marketers to develop ads of various lengths.
Recently a study by Opera Mediaworks found that the 46.69% of all mobile video ads produced clocked in at 15 seconds or less. The next most popular length fell between 21 and 30 seconds with 33.16% ads falling into that category.
Similarly AdColony found that the average video length amongst all impressions was 20.6 seconds. However calling this length “average” isn’t to say that most ads are of that length — perhaps “mean” is a better term. In fact only 11% of videos were 20 seconds long while over half were shorter and over a third were longer.
Apps and Outlets
The biggest venue for mobile video ads has been in apps. When you combine in-app ads viewed on phones and tablets, they comprise 76% of all video advertisements according to the Mobile Marketing Association.
The largest and perhaps the most well known utilizer of mobile video ads is YouTube. According to eMarketer, YouTube’s ad revenue in the US will reach $1.13 billion this year and they’ll make up 18.9% of the digital video ad market.
In October the Facebook-owned photo app Instagram began offering advertisers the opportunity to run 15 second video ads for the first time. Upon launch giant brands like Disney, Warner Brothers, and Activision signed up making this new venture rather promising. As Jonathan Anastas, head of digital and social media for Activision told Adweek, "Our audience is becoming increasingly mobile-centric, and Instagram is a mobile-centric platform... So it's an important part of the marketing mix."
Other video ads appear on sites and in apps that range in focus. A study by Opera Mediaworks found that video ad completion rates were strong across a variety of apps, but there were a few standouts. Those apps related to shopping, sports or health and fitness saw completion rates of over 90%. All other categories came in over 80% except for news and information apps which had about half of that.
Incentivizing
Another angle marketers have used to get mobile users to watch their spots is offering incentives. These range from digital gifts in mobile games to the promise of uninterrupted premium content in exchange for viewing an extended ad. As eMarketer reports, 30.9% of those surveyed report that they’d happily watch a mobile video ad in order to view free premium content afterwards while another 13.5% would do so begrudgingly.
Conclusion
The rise in mobile video ads has provided advertisers with more data about what types of video ads are the more effective. The first step in taking advantage of this increasingly popular medium is to assess these different options and figure out the best plan of attack for your mobile video campaign.
