Advertisements – who has not seen them? We see ads in TVs, newspapers, we hear them in radios, but more importantly, we see them online today. We see them in all computing devices we use, but of them all, mobile online advertising has been growing leaps and bounds. The numbers we have been hearing are mind boggling. In the US alone, video ads in total are projected to touch eight billion dollars this year. Social media driven video ads is one of the major contributors here and of their numbers, seventy five percent is said to be coming from mobile devices. Predictions also say that these already high numbers are poised to grow even further, giving an unimaginable face lift to the mobile advertising industry. Mobile ad revenue in the US alone is expected to grow 110 percent YoY until 2016.
While these numbers are certainly promising, the lingering question for me is how effective are these online advertisements. Do users really view them, how effective are they in targeting the right audience, how do you measure the success of such viewed ads – these are all importance questions for organizations to consider not just for themselves but also for the larger industry. Surprisingly 72 percent of the agencies that responded to a survey say that the ads are effective – the parameters they include for determining the effectiveness quotient is also very different. To some it is just the completion of the ad view, to others, it is conversion, for others it is the click through rate and what is interesting is that only for very few it is the sales impact that determines the effectiveness of the ad.
Online video advertising is a serious business. There is a lot more to it than the actual ad itself. In fact the ad is only a very small portion of the entire mix. There are several other factors such as who to use it for, is it a search ad or a display ad, will it be pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll, how to track ad statistics and leverage business intelligence to use the view information to help deliver business outcomes etc. The good news here is that there is definitely convergence between ad content delivery and making it effective for both end users and organizations alike, making this an important business to watch for in the coming years.