2016 is finally the “year of the video”

It’s official: Video has taken over the internet. It is everywhere, and I mean everywhere; video content is cropping up in our social accounts, news articles, even our emails.

For us marketers, it’s a dream come true. Videos provide us with so much more opportunity to engage with our consumers than standard display ads, and marketing teams are jumping on board to reap the benefits.

Here are four important things to know about video and its ever-growing significance in our marketing worlds.

1. Video inventory is massive

We have all seen more video content online, but here are some stats to back that up:

• Video inventory growth is significantly larger than other digital advertising media. eMarketer predicts US spending will grow to $14.77 billion in 2019, from $9.59 billion in 2016 (a 54-percent increase!).
• Ericsson predicts mobile video traffic will grow 55 percent per year until 2020.
• Cisco states that it would take an individual over five million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every single month in 2020!

2. It’s not all on YouTube

YouTube is the grandfather of online video, monopolizing the video scene for over a decade, but the competition is heating up. The biggest threat for YouTube is the rise of the social video.

In Facebook’s 2015 Q3 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed an average of eight billion daily video views. This is no happy accident, as Facebook has been investing significantly in video throughout 2015 and 2016, and it’s released features such as video autoplay, live broadcasting and live reactions to make video marketing a success on its platform.

That said, YouTube is still the leader — for now. Venturebeat worked out that every day, Americans watch an aggregate of 8,061 years of video content on YouTube, compared with just 713 years of video content on Facebook.

Facebook and Google are increasingly competing in all things digital marketing, and video is high on both companies’ agendas. It will be fascinating to see how they can outdo each other in terms of video design, tracking and execution in the next year or two. Watch this space to see how this battle plays out.

 3. It’s not TV

Many marketers are making the mistake of recycling their TV adverts and reusing them for their online video campaigns. The best in the business are treating online video differently from anything fit for the television.

Online ads need to be visual, engaging and short. Here’s why:

• People don’t like unexpected noise. Facebook and other leading video ad slot providers only allow audio on video if the user clicks to play the sound; this has led to 85 percent of Facebook ads being watched without sound, according to a report by Sahil Patel in Digiday. Therefore, craft your videos so that they can be understood with clear text and visuals that convey the intended message.
• People engage if they are engaged. Users can engage with online video through liking, commenting, saving, sharing or even hiding. Viral videos go viral because they evoke a reaction, with either funny, relatable or emotional content.
• A Microsoft study found that people’s attention span is just eight seconds long (a goldfish is nine seconds). Videos need to be brought to life in the first few seconds so they can quickly pique people’s interest before they scroll away.
• People aren’t the same. Programmatic is steering marketing into a hyper-relevant era where video messages can be tailored depending on what audience is being targeted.

4. “Online video” can be more than just a video

We are starting to see some exciting new features that really push the boundaries of what marketers can do with their online video campaigns. Here’s a look at three examples where marketers have used new features that take video one step further.

Coldplay & Interactive Video. Source: http://coldplay.com/ink/

Blind, in collaboration with the digital media company Interlude, helped promote Coldplay’s new music video by making the online version interactive. People are able to select different scenarios throughout the video to create their own version of events. Try it out here.

Benefit Cosmetics ran a live broadcasting of “Tipsy Tricks,” which features makeup artists sipping drinks and then talking through some makeup tips for their fans.

Screenshot of Benefits Cosmetics’ “Tipsy Tricks,”

Finally, General Motors pushed a Chevrolet product launch by running a live broadcasting clip to showcase the car, but also complemented this with a 360 interactive video for users to take a personal look around the interior of the vehicle.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GNILQ_6xsso+

Video is unquestionably here to stay. If they haven’t already, companies need to catch this wave before they are cast out of the competition.