Social Video Trends Of 2014
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This article is by Richard Kosinski, president, U.S., at Unruly, a branded-video technology, insights and analytics firm.
From a decline in YouTube’s video-viewing dominance and the rise of Facebook’s video ads, to new industry standards and evolving ways of buying and selling video inventory, 2014 was a watershed year for social video. But what were the biggest challenges the industry saw in 2014? And, more important, what do marketers need to know as we enter 2015 amid these changes?
Marketers woke up to YouTube’s limitations. Believe it or not, YouTube is not the only video player in town. Despite more than 6 billion hours of video watching taking place on YouTube every month, 75% of video views occur outside of the YouTube platform, according to comScore.
There are 1 billion sites outside of YouTube where consumers are watching and discovering video content online. It’s what Unruly calls the Open Web. So spending 100% of your video-advertising budget with YouTube is like spending all of your TV ad spend on one just one TV channel. It just doesn’t happen. We predict that YouTube will continue to a decline in its share as the Open Web continues to expand and more sites include video ads in their native environments.
Facebook shook up the digital video ecosystem. After an on-again, off-again video business strategy, this was the year that Facebook truly challenged YouTube as a go-to online video platform. The world’s largest social network rolled out sponsored video ads for brands within the newsfeed with a $1 million-a-day price tag. It also made its view counts—an alternative to the YouTube counter that has long held sway with advertisers—publicly available.
Its efforts have paid off. The number of video views on Facebook increased 50% from May to June of 2014, according a blog post by the company. In July, Facebook announced that video views on the platform exceeded 1 billion each day. According to comScore, 2013 saw 2% of all US video viewing coming from Facebook. Meanwhile, in 2014 it jumped to 10% of all video views. And, according to comScore, by August Facebook overtook YouTube for the first time in the U.S. in terms of number of videos viewed on desktop. With a user base of 1.35B active monthly users and acquisitions such as Instagram of (photo & video), LiveRail (video ad platform), WhatsApp (mobile messaging) and Oculus (virtual reality) we think Facebook has only scratched the surface of its video potential.
Brands committed to automated video buying. According to a recent report from eMarketer, programmatic video is the fastest-growing category of programmatic buying. If you’re asking yourself what exactly is programmatic buying, you’re not alone. According to a study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester, 41% of brand marketers had never heard of the term or were unsure of what it is. Despite this, an August 2014 survey by Adap.tv found that more than half of U.S. publishers (51%) reported selling premium video ad inventory programmatically this year, up from just 36% in 2013, indicating 2015 will be a year of education around programmatic buying.
On the demand side, some major brands, including Procter & Gamble and Mondelez, announced their intentions to increase their programmatic media-investment plans. This struck fear into many premium publishers, who typically have seen programmatic buying as a threat to the existing relationship-based sales model. They shouldn’t. AsYahoo!’s Marissa Mayer stated at a 4As conference in Los Angeles this year, “The opposite of programmatic is manual, not premium.”
And major brands are constantly looking to make their media investment more efficient. An
AOL study, published in August, found 60% of brands and agencies bought video and mobile ads programmatically. And 54% said they’d increase programmatic video spending in 2015. This trend will continue as brands and their agencies continue to increase their programmatic stack capabilities and look for the efficiencies that automated video buying can deliver.
Viewability and Anti-Fraud emerged as challenges to buying programmatically. Seems like we took two steps forward and one back in 2014. While marketers clearly loved the efficiencies of automated (programmatic) impression buying, less so was their satisfaction in learning that viewability benchmarks were surprisingly low. This included two primary areas: viewability, or percentage of ads that are actually seen and not auto-playing out of sight, and fraud. The IAB recently announced a 70% video viewability standard that is being hotly contested.
Fraud, especially non-human traffic, is also a real and growing concern. It is exacerbated in programmatic environments where video ads are delivered on a massive scale, and where the human element is replaced by machines to identify and deliver video impressions. It creates a tempting opportunity for fraudsters to game the system by delivering clicks and getting paid for their traffic. According to Integral Ad Science’s Q2 2014 Media Quality Report, the level of overall ad fraud reached 11.5%, with 3.5% from direct publishers, 10.5% from networks and 16.5% in exchanges. And according to Advertising Age, Kraft rejects up to 80% of impressions offered by real-time ad marketplaces. In 2015, brands and agencies will demand to know that the views they’re paying for are real. We also think that there will be a number of MRC-accredited suppliers who will rise to help solve this business challenge.
Video demand and supply will continue to rapidly expand. There will be winners and losers. There will be new ways to make money, and certainly the threat of those looking to game the system. And on the whole, we think that 2015 will be even more of an exciting year of change where video is concerned.
