This morning, a new report fresh off the presses from e-marketer indicates blistering growth in online video advertising over the next 5 years. Driven by a proliferation of ad networks, demand-side-platforms and scalable, social video production solution-providers, e-marketer sees online video ad spending nearly doubling in only four years from $4.14 billion dollars in 2013 to $8.04 billion by 2016, a 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). With the online video advertising industry’s market size and revenue pool set to double over the next five years, the digital video space is also expected to mature to achieve more standardization in video ad format, a larger shift to cost-per-action ad pricing and a rise in native branding on publisher sites.
Meanwhile, TV and digital video advertising revenue pools continue to blur and converge, as multi-platform and multi-screen video advertising is increasingly become an integrated norm. “We’re pretty much approaching all of our major broadcast partnerships in concert with our digital programs,” says David Matathia, director of marketing communications at Hyundai Motor America. “When we’re working with network partners, it’s now rare to see a standalone TV or a standalone digital deal. It’s almost become standard practice to package digital and broadcast together.”
With digital marketers more than ever looking to social video as a key tool to convey rich, sharable brand experiences, e-marketers projections hardly come as a surprise. However, according to e-marketer and Credit Suisse, this growth will be accompanied by stable-to-rising CPMs for marketers (as well as higher RPMs to content creators) on networks like YouTube and mid-tier blog and media placement sites.
US Online Video CPM, by Inventory Tier, 2010-2017
Source: Credit Suisse, e-marketer. Excludes mobile display ad impressions.
Although the report doesn’t touch on social video and branded entertainment advertising, growth in that sub-class is also expected to be strong, driven by the reality that consumers increasingly have (1) more freedom over how, when and where they consume video (and by extension, to skip or ignore ads), (2) more devices to navigate between, (3) more social media activity informing their online identity and (4) less patience for content that isn’t contextually relevant, entertaining and/or informative.
Overall, with marketers, agencies and media companies set to double spending on online video in only a few short years, the future certainly looks bright for standardization, consolidation, innovation and maturity in the digital video advertising space. Let’s hope the quality of the ad content keeps up (or, better yet, improves) with the big expected boost in spending.
We are proud to show you the first video demonstration of our video testing analytics app! Now you can know exactly what your audience thinks of your videos.
As a first order of business, the thunder-stealing, lead-in answer is still “probably not.” That said, this week we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new video analytics tool for ad agencies and video content marketers that brings this predictive digital marketing dream one step closer.
Our solution is a first-of-its-kind tool capable of performing targeted, simultaneous algorithm and audience-based testing of a single video, multiple videos or even multiple edits of the same branded content spot. By enabling digital advertisers, video marketers and content creators to specify audience goals such as age, gender, income level, zip-code and/or video “share rate,” then quickly test their videos against those goals and audience profile, our scoring tool brings scalable marketing automation, big data analytics and a rapid-prototyping feedback loop to video production, video audience measurement and video performance forecasting. Beneficial ways to use our new video analytics tool include:
A/B testing different video concepts or video edits to determine which performs best for a given campaign/activation goal or audience profile.
Test and compare your videos against public videos from competitors on key metrics like audience retention and viewer click-through rate (CTR).
Pre-release testing one or multiple pre-roll or TV ad spots earlier to proactively reduce the risk of negative brand exposure, campaign under-performance, mis-targeting and/or distribution over-spend.
Evaluating branded entertainment and web series pilots with richer tools, deeper insights and a faster feedback loop (so you don’t have to play the Netflix game and order seasons up front at $4.5 million an episode).
Best of all, by connecting your YouTube or Wistia video hosting account (plus more hosting platforms on the way), users will also be able to compare and back-test predicted video virality versus actual, real-world earned media rates, social media mentions and referral shares, and easily generate reports.
Content-loving customers had better take note, because you just leap-frogged blogging and slide deck-styling all the way making a video for your brand. “Video? Isn’t that the future of marketing and like 60% of all internet traffic?” You’re damn right it is, and now your content marketing prowess is on full display to all your customers and social media followers, not to mention a billion monthly YouTube users. WIN. That’s right internet – we’re uploaded, we’re discoverable and we’re in the game with a titanic 88 views in week one. And people, 88 views is just the beginning, because by week two we’ll be making waves with triple digit viewership, am I right?
It saddens me to say that in ZoomTilt’s line of work, I seem to have this exact same conversation on a weekly basis:
Brand: We want a viral video. None of our videos are getting good viewership and we’re spending a lot of time and money on them.
Me: Well, what kind of videos are you making right now?
Brand: Pretty much all documentary-style testimonial interviews and really slick, artsy, color-corrected videos of beautiful, waif-ish people walking down dim hallways showcasing our product.
Me: Would you consider experimenting and cross-testing different types of video creative? Maybe something more relevant to your target demo that’s funny, or edgy, or surprising? Perhaps with memorable, strongly-defined characters? We can define success metrics and perform deep data-gathering and predictive A/B testing on each one.
Brand: Oh no, no, no. We could never do that. Characters? We’re not GEICO, we don’t have a Gecko… the brand IS the personality. Besides, we can’t be a funny brand or an edgy brand, we’re an elegant, sophisticated, reliable, precision-engineered brand whose experience must translate like a haiku told upon the shore of a placid lake. So what can we do like that that’s going to go pretty viral..?
Stop. Video marketers, 95% of you need to re-think your approach right now, because that one competitor who gets it is smoking your PR and inbound marketing efforts. So let’s cut the small talk and get you started with our field-guide of key video marketing pitfalls to avoid. If you’re making videos for your brand and no one is watching them, here are the ten (10) reasons why:
1. You don’t really know your audience. Knowing who your audience is (say age 35+ working mothers) isn’t the same as knowing their media consumption habits and what content resonates with them – you need to understand both.
Let’s start with a typical customer video from a mainstream, mom-oriented consumer brand:
Ok, darling and highly likable Mom? Check. Solid brand that knows how to do fun video creative? Check (*ahem* Old Spice Guy *ahem*). Video that will inspire anyone to share your message or watch more? Complete miss. Don’t get us wrong, there are great opportunities out there in user-generated content, but why would a mom watch dozens of nearly identical informational testimonials for the same product? And why does Pampers, a globally-recognized diaper brand, feel the need to flood its YouTube channel and crowd out its more premium content with so many different iterations of the same bland, product credibility-builder video that doesn’t create informational or emotional value for their customers? Why would a diaper-buyer watch multiple minutes of this type of video content rather than simply executing a 15 second Google search to quickly skim a credible blog review on the same product? Your customers’ time, convenience and content consumption autonomy are highly relevant to your digital content strategy – respect them.
Now let’s take a look at some of their professional creative:
Strong start here too – who doesn’t love cute, happy babies with bed-head? But ouch, only 6 likes and 3 dislike? What gives?
Well, to summarize the entire campaign message: “if your baby pees or poops itself and doesn’t get changed, it won’t be happy (or have great, disheveled hair) like these happy babies.” What’s new, insightful or interesting about that message, one that more or less restates the same biological principle mothers have known for decades, if not centuries? Sorry Pampers, we already know your diapers are probably a little bit better (and a little bit more expensive) than some of the other brands sitting next to you on the shelf, your single layer of additional protection isn’t boosting brand lift or getting anyone to retweet this.
Want to know who gets motherhood? Fiat gets motherhood:
2. Your content doesn’t create value.
A lot of marketers think successful branded video content needs to have professional, $10,000-per-minute-and-up production quality. It doesn’t. Nor does it even necessarily have to be funny or shocking, although that usually helps. But one thing your content MUST accomplish is value creation for the viewer, which can be either informational value, emotional value or both, like these:
3. Your content generates a low-valence emotional response.
72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, so if you make something average it will get skipped and ignored. If you create something on the far end of the spectrum that generates high viewer emotional arousal, audiences will engage with and share your video.
Right (creative) way to make a marketing video for your pizza business:
Wrong (traditional, uncreative) way to make a marketing video for your pizza business:
4. Your video content doesn’t have hooks early and often.
Again, when you create content, your content is competing for attention against an ocean of entertaining video, great music and informative blog articles. You don’t need to perform an epic jump from space like RedBull, but be sure to hook viewers’ attention early and often to avoid drop-off and defection to other content. Nice job Pepsi:
5. Your content has no story arc.
Both of these videos feature heavy men’s business apparel product placements. Which do you think had the better digital campaign return on investment (ROI) and repeat viewer engagement because viewers wanted to know what happens next?
Story:
No story:
6. No one found your great video.
Unfortunately, successful video content marketing isn’t just creating great content, then putting it up on your YouTube page, blog and facebook feed and moving on to the next thing. Videos live and die by discovery, and you need to get a broad audience (and, for that matter, the right audience) looking at your work. I wrote a pretty comprehensive introductory explainer to getting more views on your video here on Quora. Check it out and feel free to leave comments or feedback if it was helpful or you disagree with any of my core points. Whatever you do, don’t make the same mistakes as Cybergeddon.
7. You didn’t test your video(s).
Traditional video content marketing – particularly branded entertainment – can be high-reward, but also moderate risk. Even with significant investment in seeding and paid media, big branded content efforts can crash and burn because the creators missed their audience or couldn’t quite pull it together on execution. At ZoomTilt, our branded entertainment media buying process is closely-integrated with video A/B-testing, so that not only do advertisers get to compare multiple creative variations based on the same brief or campaign objective, but they can also make data-driven predictions about targeted audience engagement and content virality prior to committing their full production spend. Test your videos, don’t just pull the trigger on a $300,000 media buy because your 24 year old intern down the hall who wears skinny jeans thinks they’re epic.
8. You’re not amplifying or complementing the conversation.
During prime time, up to 60% of the conversation happening on Twitter can be related to TV. Yes, successful TV shows can create global hashtags in real time. While digital isn’t at that scale and more fragmented, it’s also not as ephemeral here-and-gone as a TV ad, and that’s a big opportunity for marketers to capitalize on. Create companion content, connect your videos to product promotions or product launches, integrate hashtags and then measure it all. Entertaining storytelling is a huge catalyst for social media activity and engagement, so don’t silo your videos from your overall social media marketing efforts.
9. You’re missing the long tail.
Just like search engine optimization (SEO), strategically targeting the long tail (and long tail keywords in your video title, text description and metadata) can pay off big, particularly when your video has little relevant competition but really strikes a chord with a spirited niche. Get it right, and next thing you know your content gets picked up on Mashable and your sales go through the roof. Just ask the OraBrush guys:
10. You’re the 1,000th brand to hop on a content-competitive trend.
Don’t go head-to-head on replica content with Fortune 500 marketing giants (unless you yourself are a Fortune 500 marketing giant) if you can’t bring something really new, fresh and novel to the table:
This wins (#JeffGordonisonFire):
This doesn’t (#sorryHubspot):
The difference a little creativity and the scale of your audience reach [a solid celebrity cameo that doesn't bust your budget usually doesn't hurt either] collectively make on the success of your content cannot be understated.
Now let’s go out there and make successful branded videos people love.
This year’s SXSWi was again amazing, despite the long lines and the lack of sleep that pervade everything. I was particularly inspired by a session I attended on Monday Morning called “Death by Demographics: Killing Off Your Ad Budgets” with Ann Zimmerman from WSJ, Joe Magnacca from Radio Shack, Todd Morris from Catalina, and Bonin Bough from Mondelez (Oreo). Bonin was the highlight of the session, making jokes that had the whole audience in stitches. But as someone immersed in the branded video realm, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a final conclusion about video that the panel didn’t get to.
The brilliant theory that was the focus of the session was the idea that demographics — the bedrock of advertisers for decades — don’t work that well anymore. A thirty-eight year old female might be a small business owner and a twenty-five year old male might be a stay-at-home dad depending on their background. Bonin called it “culture vs cluster”, explaining that the culture of the person you are marketing to is far more important than their age, gender, and other demographics.
Brand advertisers have much better data at their fingertips nowadays than they did in the heyday of demographics. Consumer chatter on social media, purchase history, and other trackable metrics can shed much better light on what individual consumers want. The job of the marketer is to use that information to create a relationship with the consumer, to create content that is relevant to the consumer.
The panel did talk about video media, and their take on it was that traditional television advertising was a necessary evil. TV ads aim at demographics, you can’t track them, you have no idea if people skipped or ignored your ad, but when you combine television advertising with more targeted marketing you can increase the overall ROI across those platforms.
The panel also talked about how well video fits the culture model. Video is inherently cultural — more cultural than any other form of marketing. And yet they are still relying on demographics in video. Why? Because that’s all they think they can get with broadcast television.
Online video provides brands the opportunity to specifically target the culture of the people who buy their product. And by the very nature of entertainment, those people are ten times more likely to share entertaining videos with other people in their culture than any other piece of marketing material. Clearly, the next step for brands that are marketing by culture instead of demographic is to use video the same way.
Some brands have already done an excellent job of creating video content that marries their brand with an emotional, cultural message that viewers flock to: BMW’s The Hire series, Degree’s The Rookie, Kmart’s First Day, Intel’s The Beauty Inside, and my favorite, Hell Pizza’s Deliver Me to Hell. I’m looking forward to the next great video stories coming, not from Hollywood, but from my soon-to-be-favorite brand.
The first advertiser-supported web series was Scott Zakarin’s The Spot, way back in 1995. The fictional Real World-style showtook full advantage of the Internet’s ability to draw in viewers on several platforms. The characters blogged before there were blogs, posted photos and videos, and e-mailed with viewers, who would discuss the show and give feedback on thespot.com.
With ZoomTilt heading to SXSW as one of eight Entertainment tech startups, it’s clear that the world of web entertainment is expanding. So much so, that most web series sink in the sea of series. How can viewers like you find content like ours?
Sure, there are The Streamys, The Webbys, and all kinds of Fests; but how do we find the shows of our dreams? With the Internet comes a wide array of niche audiences. Web series must break away from the streamlined Hollywood plots of preexisting TV shows by getting creative and getting weird. The key is to do what you can’t do on TV, by avoiding overdone plots and also taking advantage of the world that entertainment now lives in. Whether people are watching it from a mobile device, their computer, or their plain old tube, a web series will succeed when it is coupled with strong viewer engagement by offering “extras.”
This is a huge part of what makes web entertainment so enticing – the immediacy and interactivity of it all. People want it how they want it, when they want it. What if you didn’t have to wait and tune in next week ever again? Netflix has decided to see what happens when they release their own entire web series at once. This may work for Netflix, but for most independent filmmakers and small production companies, maintaining an engaged audience over time and spreading a series to several different social networking sites is crucial to the success of a new show.
It’s one thing when companies like Netflix and Intel launch online TV, but the bulk of web series are being created on a tight budget. Despite the cheap and quick nature of the Internet, a web series will only take off with an original and well-developed story line. Getting original ideas in motion is necessary. ZoomTilt reaches into the pool of independent filmmakers to produce fresh content for brands. Another collaborative website, The Republic, hosts the Reddit Comedy Project, allowing the audience to crowdsource the premises and rank the pitches.
In the words of media mogul Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” Sure, you can take a TV show and distribute it on the Internet, or take a web series and slap it on the television; but the success of web series today relies on originality, quality, and maximizing the interactivity of the Internet.
While most media attention over the past few days has fixated on Instagram’s highly controversial privacy policy changes, another key announcement out of the Facebook camp with specific relevance to video marketers is also well worth your attention. Yes, 2013 will bring a new era of Facebook ad strategy to its newsfeed – video. ‘Autoplay’ ads are set to debut on the mega platform in the first six months of 2013, and are likely to pull large ad dollars from TV advertisers to the site. With reports from Ad Age and Mashable pouring in, the biggest question on everyone’s mind is – will it work?
Like its current ads, Facebook ‘Autoplay’ ads can be targeted to specific groups and interest categories of Facebook users on their desktop, mobile and tablet versions of Facebook. Rumor has it that Facebook will look to cap the length of these video ads at 15 seconds (shorter than the normal 30-second minimums) and will start playing automatically in both the left and right columns of the screen. Advertisers can expect to be able to play the same video ad to a Facebook user up to three times a day across all devices.
To what degree Facebook’s move is a threat or challenge to incumbent ad-supported video ecosystems like YouTube and Hulu remains to be seen, but it’s clear that embracing video (particularly if done better than Facebook’s own recently maligned “Facebook is like a Chair” video campaign) could be a big money maker for the social giant. With all this excitement about the possibilities of ‘Autoplay’ ads, many advertisers are still wondering about the details: will these ads be able to be shown to just a brand’s Facebook fan base? Friends of fans? Facebook users at large? Will they eventually be inserted pre-roll into video posts like YouTube’s TrueView ads?
A few concerns that have been floating around the internet since ‘Autoplay’ has been introduced is the actual auto play function, which consumers often see as intrusive and annoying. Advertising execs wonder here if those auto plays should count towards a view even if the user has scrolled or clicked away from them. The biggest concern though is how consumers will react. With negative outrages coming with each major Facebook change (Timeline, ticker etc), not to mention the aforementioned Instagram PR debacle, advertisers might be hesitant to get on board straightaway without seeing how the first videos are received. No matter what the concerns are, this is expected to be a big advancement for the Facebook as well as the advertising industry in 2013.
Video marketing is a content marketing cornerstone, and an integral aspect of brand reach, influence, experience and inbound engagement. Regardless of what your brand identity is, if you aren’t prioritizing video marketing within your content marketing roadmap, then you’re missing one of the best opportunities to draw audiences and customers to an immersive message that is (1) highly sharable in digital and (2) when done correctly, creates high-valence emotional connections. Video marketing can put tiny companies like Dollar Shave Club firmly on the blog roll in a matter of weeks, catapult fledging startups like Ministry of Supply to Kickstarter campaign immortality and event help an established brand like Samsung reinvent itself as the hip, iconic upstart usurping Apple’s smart phone dominance.
Source: Edelman and Adobe.
Overall, there are many benefits to video marketing, including these seven benefits every digital marketer needs to know:
7. Less Investment Needed for Video Marketing Than You Might Think
Did your agency just quote you $200,000 for that social video campaign activation for two quarters from now? Then you’re talking to the wrong solution provider. The reality is technology, information access and competition among creatives has dramatically dropped the cost of procuring high quality, professional video. Moreover, branded video doesn’t need sparkling big-budget studio color-correction to succeed with online audiences. Rather, it needs to resonate with viewers by being hilarious, edgy, inspiring or shocking, and above all, authentic, with characters, visuals and experiences people relate to. As a result, companies like Ford, Ikea, Proctor & Gamble, KMart, Target, AT&T and Fidelity are finding that with just a fraction of their TV ad budget, some savvy storyboarding, social media integration and a thoughtful distribution strategy, digital video marketing significantly outperforms the ROI from traditional TV ad investment.
Which would you rather watch?
Traditional media (sorry eHarmony):
New media:
We thought so too.
6. Precision Targeting
With digital video marketing your brand can reach a targeted consumer audience with relative ease. And by properly taking advantage of social media, distribution channel and keyword targeting, your priority demographic audience can be engaged with near-surgical precision. By combining good content with sufficient seeding to drive an initial, critical mass of viewers to their content microsite, YouTube channel and/or social media hub, brands can hit an earned media home run from social sharing and viral referral. Advocates who like your video are more than empowered to tag, retweet, repost, pin or re-blog it if you make content that is highly sharable.
5. When People Care They Share and Participate
Watching video generates approximately 60% of internet traffic. Other data show that YouTube’s 1 million daily unique visitors watch nearly 3 billion videos per day, with 46% of those viewers taking some sort of action for every TrueView ad they see – typically by clicking the “skip” button. Today’s consumers are highly-connected, easily-distracted internet-informed socialites who recognize when a company is creating value for them rather than just trying to shove a product or message down their throats. This doesn’t mean Millenials can’t be advertised to; but it does mean the way advertising communicates and engages them has fundamentally changed. When 18 to 24 year olds were asked “How do you want to a brand to interact with you?” in a study performed by Global Web Index, over 65% of respondents replied “Entertain me,” a response which occurred higher than “Keep me informed,” “Connect me with people” or “Provide me with interesting experiences.” Moreover, because video is such “leveraged communication” (if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be 100,000+?), the stakes for both success and failure are bigger as well as faster. A truly viral video is elusive – as well as marketing nirvana – but it’s a lot easier to create audience engagement magic and widespread social chatter with a recurring, character-driven video story viewers tune into episode after episode.
Generally, a broad range of recent success stories in branded video entertainment points toward five key themes in winning the battle for video engagement: (1) be authentic, (2) tell a compelling, recurring story, (3) manage content duration and pacing for maximum entertainment payload, (4) give audiences a way to get involved and participate if they want and (5) experiment; try new things. Particularly relevant (and good news) for marketers is the fact that audience’s social sharing of content happens irrespective of the presence or absence of branding and branded messages within the content. Additionally, highly engaged audiences do convert better, in many cases showing 300% higher ad click-through rates on high-quality web TV series compared to average industry pre-roll rates.
4. Humanizing the Brand Experience and Increasing Accessibility
Being more than just a brand is essential to the dialogue you maintain with our customers and social followers. Audiences today want to see the heart, people and characters behind the logo, and video marketing is the one of the best ways to achieve that. When Hubspot rallies its inbound team to perform a cover-rendition of Psy’s viral YouTube opus “Gangnam Style” or Pixability puts its team front and center in entertaining, informational skits on its YouTube channel, it demystifies the brand in an accessible way that enables audiences to enjoy an insider’s perspective.
3. Video Marketing Simultaneously Solidifies Your Inbound and Outbound Marketing Presence
Having a strong, joint outbound and inbound marketing presence is not just smart; in today’s digital marketing landscape it might as well be a necessary. Strong, video marketing allows for this to be achieved with a great deal of ease by generating and proliferating content that simultaneously broadcasts the brand experience and also draws in audiences around conversion destinations.
2. Trial & Error
In the old days of video marketing, brands could simply advertise their product on someone else’s content (for example, TV), because the content brought people’s captive attention to their message. But with traditional TV viewer growth stagnant, time-shifted TV becoming the status quo and 33-50% of TV viewers also consuming additional content on a second-screen device, brands need to embrace new content marketing approaches to bridge the engagement gap. According to the Ruder Finn Intent Index, not surprisingly 82% of people want to be entertained, 96% of people want to be educated, and 92% of people want to be participating in something meaningful. Put that together and it’s not surprising in hindsight that “This is Not Yellow” was a smash success.
But who could have predicted that? The great thing about digital video is that its cost structure and its medium makes experimentation and controlled tests with different content types, experiences and ecosystems a lot easier than, say, experimenting with Super Bowl Commercials. At ZoomTilt, our business centers around testing, piloting, analyzing and distributing a broad range of branded entertainment concepts before we advise our clients to make their media buy and serialize content. That way, video marketers have a lot more certainty around the brand experience they’re creating, the app integration(s) they want to run, as well as the ROI, engagement, reach and earned media outlook for the campaign.
1. Striking Gold: Content that Goes Viral
The holy grail of video marketing is seeing content catch on like wildfire and end up instantly spread all over the web within days. When this happens, a little-known content creator or brand can find themselves transformed into a cultural icon overnight. While it’s impossible to target “virality as a strategy,” gradually building a vested audience with steady, high-quality video content marketing certainly increases the chances that a specific video will catch and ignite. But rather than chasing a single, viral “home run,” steadily hitting singles and doubles – videos that collect tens of thousands of views, consistently broaden awareness of your brand’s message and increase your social reach – can not only supercharge the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, it can set the stage for when that perfect storm of a video happens to come along:
Web series aren’t just a guy/gal with a camera, a couch and a vlog talk show anymore, and audiences and advertisers are taking notice. With brands like Ford, Ikea, Target, Yahoo and Intel spending millions annually creating original web entertainment on top of YouTube’s own premium content buys from Hollywood and networks like Machinima, demand for compelling, original entertainment is rising rapidly, and content creators are rising to the occasion.
This week, ZoomTilt debuts three new made-for-web TV comedy pilots: “The Pickup Chicks”, “Spycology”, and “Cool Justice”. Although the three comedies are starkly different shows – with backdrops ranging from Brooklyn bars to a top-secret Spy Academy to a 1970′s L.A. drug bust – they all have several qualities in common: memorable, unique characters, top-quality professional cinematography and studio-caliber story arc development. Following on the tradition established by recent web series standouts like “The Beauty Inside,” Warner Premiere’s “H+: The Digital Series” and “Dating Rules for My Future Self,” ZoomTilt’s first three shows coming out of the TV Reset Project webseries competition demonstrate that creative, compelling storytelling and community-building trumps big budgets in generating earned media and audience engagement.
The first new ZoomTilt pilot is romantic comedy “The Pickup Chicks” by Stacie Capone, which follows a trio of Brooklyn roomates-turned-entrepreneurs dealing with the unexpected success of their dating service for hopeless single guys:
The second show is “Cool Justice” by Todd Rulapaugh and Brian Groh, who play two larger-than-life 1970′s cops transported to modern day Los Angeles to help a beautiful heiress recover her missing inheritance:
The third show is “Spycology” by Tenth Gate Productions, where slacker spy Jack gets jolted by the threat of expulsion from Spy College and the arrival of an enigmatic new female transfer student. Can Jack harness his inner Bond before time runs out on his diploma hopes or his best buddy Tim’s hostage situation?
As both production equipment and video hosting costs continue to drop, knowledge transfer of production and editing expertise is accelerated through lightning fast internet data transfer and digital video demand continues to grow rapidly, traditional TV and “digital TV” will continue to converge and overlap, creating exciting new opportunities and avenues for content creators, advertisers, audiences and digital networks alike.
YouTube reports that TrueView ads now make as much revenue per hour in the US as television/cable ads.
You didn’t think that watching less TV on TV would leave you with less ads, did you? The average American sees 3,000 ads a day. Just like every other side of a bus or white wall, the web is the new and ultimate blank space for advertising.
But YouTube’s latest announcement provides a further proof-point that the economics of digital television is fundamentally starting to change. Although typical accessible RPM rates in the $2.00 to $7.00 range still dramatically favor low cost-per-minute user-generated content creators and Maker Studios-style skits and digital talk shows, ad spend allocation to digital video rising much faster than allocation to tradition TV, topping $3 billion globally in 2012 and on pace to reach $5 billion in only a few years. At a viewer run-rate of 1,000,000 per video, lower budget digital series and webisodes start to look economically-viable, one of the reasons why two critical factors will decide the fate of content creators not subsidized by YouTube: (1) audience-building and (2) network economics. By identifying and engaging a core audience, then scaling co-marketing/co-branding, cross-promotion and content library building, the next generation of digital TV creator networks will not only survive but thrive even at current YouTube economics, even if that means a whole host of TrueView inventory to click through to get to the content.
Outlined by YouTube’s TrueView page, brands want engaged viewers. They say, “Engage your viewers by giving them choice.”
Ultimately, as the traditional television network model breaks down, digital content is clearly stepping up. According to a 2012 Nielson study, the percent of people worldwide who have watched a video on their computer in the last month (84%) has recently surpassed the percent of people who have watched television in the last month (83%).
In particular, ZoomTilt is really stepping up its content game this Thanksgiving with five fresh-off-the-press premiere digital episodes from our five TV Reset Project finalists, just in time for Cyber Monday. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube Channel to catch all the great new entertainment coming to ZoomTilt!
