Of the 2,400 consumers questioned for the study, 13% are more likely to view the brand in a favourable light after watching an ad created for digital, while 12% said it would improve brand association. Additionally, purchase intent increased by 23% among those that were exposed to relevant video advertising compared with those that were not.

Chris Worrell, Specific Media’s director of insight, said, “We are now reaching critical mass, both in terms of brands treating it seriously and consumers accepting and embracing it as the norm.”

But he advised that the quality of video content needs to keep up with the speed at which the platform is evolving because it is now regarded as a mainstream activity.

John Baylon, Starcom Mediavest group digital trading director, said, “The industry is not taking advantage of such a great platform and all the benefits it can offer, such as more efficient targeting, optimised design and interactivity.”

To illustrate this point he said, “Channel 4 once told me that 95% of all investment in video online is on 30-second repurposed TV ads.”

The advice he gives to clients is: “Think video, not TV, so it can be applied in a more strategic way.”

Graeme Hutcheson, MediaCom associate director, agrees that merely repeating ads made for TV is far less effective than creating an online-specific creative. “The main hurdle now is engaging creative agencies and making them aware of this fact,” he said. “The holy grail is to have a piece of copy for every platform that tells a narrative story. Further down the line, it will be about having multiple copy for each platform so that different ads can be served to different consumers based on age, sex and where they are based.”

As content can be viewed on an increasing number of devices, consumers are more likely to adopt non-linear viewing habits as they are not as tied to rigid broadcast schedules. As such, content length is key and brands need to work harder to attract and keep consumer attention.

Baylon highlighted that people consume content in different ways at different times, so a person watching a two-minute news clip on their PC during their lunch break is going to be in a different position and have a different frame of mind to someone catching up on a hour-long episode of The Wire on Tevo.

“The engagement level is going to be very different, so advertisers need to think about a number of things: the time, the day, whether a viewer is at work or at home and whether it’s short- or long-form content,” he said. “If it’s short form, 12 seconds is the optimum, but if it’s an hour-long episode, consumers will have a higher propensity to watch a 30-second ad. It will also depend what platform consumers are watching video content on.”

Worrell thinks consumption patterns have changed brands and advertisers need to strike a balance between engagement and disruption. “Staying on the right side of this line with be a key challenge for brands and advertisers in the year ahead,” he said.

He reckons marketers also need to deploy softer, brand-led metrics that more established advertising platforms use, rather that relying solely on clicks. “We need to measure the impact video advertising has on the brand, against relevant target audiences,” he said.

Baylon highlighted The Pool research by Publicis’s strategic arm Vivaki, which found that its three-slate ad selector format ASq was the best format for engaging the online industry (nma.co.uk 7 October 2010).

Channel 4, YouTube and Microsoft were the first UK publishers to launch trials of the ad format, which allows viewers to pick which ad they want to watch ahead of video-on-demand content (nma.co.uk 17 November 2011).

Specific Media’s research was based on four key consumer groups: young men, young women, ABC1 adults and full-time mums. It forms the latest installment of its video testing and measurement insights (VITAMIN) study, which is being conducted in association with digital media consultancy Decipher.

The first VITAMIN research project showed that original content relating to and featuring advertisers’ brands has the highest brand recall levels and brand favourability among consumers.

Source: New Media Age

Internet usage: higher in the UK than other major countries according to Ofcom survey

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report says people in the UK watch more TV online, use the internet on their mobiles more often and play more games on their phones than people in other countries.

The research found over a quarter (27%) of UK internet users said they watched TV online every week – up 3% from the 2010 survey and higher than any of the other countries surveyed.

Eight out of 10 UK internet users (79%) said they had ordered goods or services online, higher than any other country, and UK internet users were more likely to visit retail websites online than other countries– 89% had done so in 2011.

The study found the proportion of the population owning smartphones nearly doubled in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011, up from 24% to 46% and higher than the other European countries surveyed.

The other countries surveyed included France, Germany, Italy, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Brazil, Russia, India and China, although a smaller sub-set was used for some of the analysis.

Ofcom looked at five typical baskets of communications services (fixed-line phone, mobile phone, broadband and pay-TV) and found the UK offered the lowest prices for all five when buying services individually, and four out of five when including bundles.

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, said: “Across the globe, people are embracing e-commerce and social media with enthusiasm.

“Our research shows that the UK communications market is performing well with prices, the range of services and innovation standing up well against international benchmarks.

“There are also issues which we will monitor carefully, such as the future rollout of 4G mobile services.

“We are pressing ahead with plans to release this valuable spectrum at the end of next year, which will enable new mobile services for consumers.”

Although the availability (59%) and take-up (4%) of superfast broadband in the UK compared favourably to other European countries, take-up lagged behind Japan (40%) and the US (10%).

The Ofcom study found that global communications revenues increased by 3.4% in 2011 when compared with 2010, mainly driven by strong growth in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Total retail telecoms revenues were £594bn in 2010, up 1.9% year on year, total radio revenues were £25bn in 2010, up 5% year on year, and total TV revenues were £239bn, an increase of 7.7% year on year.

Source: Mediaweek.co.uk

According to the findings of the DMA’s 2010 H2 Email Benchmarking Report, click-through rates from emails leapt from 12 million in H2 2009 to 16.1 million in H2 2010 – an increase of 33 per cent in the amount of traffic email is marshalling to clients’ websites. The half year also saw a 35 per cent rise in the volume of emails being sent during H2 2010. The number of email addresses that Email Services Providers (ESPs) manage grew across the year from 90.2 million in Q1 2010 to 101.7 million in Q4 2010.

Email marketing budgets rose through the half-year, with a third of clients spending between 21 – 40 per cent more on email in Q4 2010 compared to Q4 2009.

Surveying 20 of the UK’s ESPs, the biannual Email Benchmarking Report is produced by the DMA’s Email Marketing Council. Commenting on the findings of the report, the Council’s James Bunting said:

“Email marketers in the UK are continuing to improve on their success. The DMA’s email tracking study earlier this year showed that consumers are receiving more emails of interest to them than ever before and this latest research shows that those relevant emails are working. Email is driving more traffic to websites than ever before.

“The future looks to be even brighter because this success is occurring at a time that ESPs are promising advanced tactics within their product suites enabling even greater targeting and relevance.”

Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx – sponsors of the report, added:

“Our clients are sending more emails than ever before as they begin to embrace the ‘more is more’ maxim. With increases in volume and frequency, of course, comes the corresponding challenge of producing ever more innovative emails and the demand this places on internal resources.”

The H2 2010 Email Benchmarking Report also features the latest data on strategy and segmentation, as well as open rates and deliverability.

Source: DMA News

The bi-annual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that UK brands had boosted their online spending by 13.5% on a like-for-like basis in the first six months of 2011 to £2.26bn, a 27% share of the ad market.

This puts digital spend on track to overtake last year’s figure, which the IAB and PwC reported as £4.1bn.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, said the proliferation of new technologies such as smartphones, tablets and faster Wi-Fi, means consumers are spending more time using the internet as a “social and entertainment hub”, which is the driving force behind the £244m year-on-year increase in online ad expenditure.

“What is truly exciting is we are seeing is a move away from the internet as an information channel into a portable entertainment channel, with social media and video being both hugely influential.”

“Online is an entertainment media, much in the same way TV has been for the past decade.”

Online share on the total ad market

According to data from UKOM the UK’s online user base grew from 38.4 million in June 2010 to 39.5 million in July 2011.

UKOM Figures also show 26 million people watched 2.3 billion videos for a total of 6.4 billion minutes, averaging out at 87 videos viewed per month for an average of 4.1 hours per person.

Display is continuing its growth spurt, with an 18.5% increase year on year to take it to £510m on a like for like basis. The IAB said this was due to an increase new formats, particularly in social media.

It also pointed to video advertising increasing 100% year on year, to £45m for the first half of 2011, compared to £23m in H1 2010, as a driver for growth in display.

The Display digital media mix in £m for H1 2011

While display accounted for 23% of total online ad expenditure, paid-for search continues to command 58% of total online ad expenditure, with classifieds accounting for 17%.

The digital media mix: % share of revenues for the H1 2011

The IAB quoted UKOM data showing that 25% of time spent online in the UK is on social networks. Phillipson said the fact social, gaming, video and portals now account for 49% of time spent online, makes the medium “very attractive to brands and advertisers.”

Phillipson said the “FMCG story”, however is “most interesting” from the spend figures, adding that two years ago the sector only accounted for 9% of online ad expenditure.

According to the latest survey, consumer products account for 14.5% of online display ad expenditure, overtaking the entertainment industry for the first time, which accounted for 12.4% of display ad expenditure this half.

The consumer goods sector is now the second highest spender in digital after the financial sector.

Brands including Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Virgin, Sky and Ford are among the top 20 biggest spenders online, according to the study.

Industry sector display market shares: H1 2011

Though the stellar growth in video advertising can only be good news for the sector, the total figures are still only a fraction of TV advertising and it has been suggested the increase in online video spend is largley due to the growth of platforms such as ITV Player that have had some success transferring standard TV advertising online.

Phillipson was unable to break down where the extra spend in video advertising was coming from but said it is seeing brands invest more and more creating cross-media advertising, pointing to the Tippex ‘Hunter shoots a bear’ and Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ ads as successful video creative campaigns to illustrate the point.

“Video advertising provides a medium for brands which want to tell a story. But online is no longer a silo and we see it as a complementary media to TV,” he said.

According to recent figures from GroupM, adspend on the internet was £3.9bn in 2010, with TV at £3.4bn and newspapers (regional and national) at £2.7bn. It forecasts that for 2011, online ad expenditure will reach £4.3bn, TV will be £3.5bn and newspapers will be £2.5bn.

On the subject of where this increased investment in digital would come from, Phillipson said: “The total ad landscape is like a bench and over the years all media has budged up for the internet. Over the next few years we expect its market share to increase from 27% to 30%. And we haven’t see the effects of real-time bidding on the market yet, which over the next few years will explode.”

Phillipson added that the mobile spend figures, which saw a 116% grow last year, have not been added to the online figures, but he said, “anecdotally mobile has been performing very well”.

Lindsey Clay, managing director of Thinkbox, the commercial television trade body, said: “What’s interesting about these figures is that the fastest growing type of advertising on the internet is online TV advertising. It underlines how the internet is a technology that’s helping TV advertising to expand.”

Jason Carter, managing partner, digital, at UM London, said he has seen an increase in client spend in digital.

“It’s no surprise that video and social are driving this growth and the type of brands turning to it for brand engagement and community building are changing,” he said.

“Because of the new range of formats in video and social, we are seeing brands doing more interesting stuff who would have previously shied away from the digital space.

Source : Brandrepublic.com, 05 October 2011

Facebook might be taking the lion’s share of display advertising spend (it generated 68.69bn display ad impressions in Q3 2010 according to Comscore), but as a shopping platform, it’s still struggling to gain traction.

‘Facebook shopping’, it seems, is not quite living up to the expectations of ‘social shopping’, because Facebook lacks independent authoritative content to steer conversations and user interaction with a brand.

While a growing number of brands – from HMV to French Connection, even FMCG brands such as Mountain Dew and Heinz – have all ventured into ‘Facebook shopping’, there’s little concrete evidence emerging on its effectiveness. The most recent and oft-quoted research, by Havas Media back in June, found that 89% of people have never bought anything on Facebook, and 44% are not interested in doing so.

By contrast, research for Telegraph Fashion, which emerged last week, seeking to evaluate interaction and propensity to purchase, as well as the relationship between content and commerce, found that readers of the Telegraph fashion site who engage with expert recommendations drove the highest conversions on the publisher’s fashion shop. They were five times as likely to purchase than those who hadn’t.

Most interestingly, users directed to Telegraph Fashion content from Facebook were identified as greater consumers of content – twice the amount those visiting the Telegraph independently consumed – underlining Facebook’s role in disseminating information and reaching out to new audiences, not as a shopping platform.

Though the Association of Online Publishers’ research last year explored the relationship between engagement, content and ad responsiveness, its findings – that consumers were more willing to engage more with advertising on traditional content sites that on social networks – also goes some way to support this view. Almost a third of respondents (32%) said they felt more positive towards a brand on a content site, 17% on portals and 14% on social networks.

The Telegraph Fashion’s latest approach – marrying content, commerce and social interaction – looks potentially like a more successful combination. TMG will lead with expert comment and editorial, then solicit user recommendation, bringing visitors into an authoritative conversation and disseminating across social networks. The publisher will build on its existing I Spied proposition – the ‘best’ fashion and beauty picked by its editorial experts – extending recommendation on the site to include ways of getting visitors to participate in the selection of products.

Hearst Magazine-owned Digital Spy’s forthcoming technology launch, reported earlier this week by new media age, will take a slightly different approach, leveraging its own communities and forums to gauge user interest, forming a solid basis for product news and editorial, supported by an ecommerce partner.

So perhaps, rather than thinking about setting up a Facebook shop, brands might think about forming ecommerce alliances with magazines and publishers, looking at refining strategies around a strengthened triad of content, commerce and social interaction facilitated by a social network, not dominated by it.

Social media provides recommendation and interaction, but doesn’t have an authority on content comparative with traditional content sites. Content, on the other hand, facilitates influence, and when, coupled with social interactions – including recommendation or sharing – can be even more effective in steering ecommerce.

—- Gina Lovett, New Media Age.

However, to be fair, Google has done a pretty good job on the buzz around the launch of Google +. And as some of you might be the privileged few who have had the opportunity of manoeuvring around Google+, you will agree how great the design of Google+ is, what with the colours, the layout and just the different visual elements that are important to generate user traffic and to attract users to sign up. Although you might say that it looks a bit like Facebook, Facebook is such a huge benchmark for any new player in the social networking arena that if you don’t have any of the features Facebook does, there will be more -1’s than +1′s.

The concepts of “circles” and “huddles” is quite interesting and might end up being the primary factor that gives Google+ the edge it needs to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Giving their users the option to choose which of their friends they want to share particular information with is quite a refreshing idea. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook has it too, but have you tried categorising 600 friends into different lists? It take ages, literally.

Google announced only some hours ago that any non-user profiles on Google+ will be shut down i.e. profiles for any business, brand, NGO’s or organizations. It’s not very clear why they have taken this step but it is probably because they are still building an optimized business experience for brands and organizations. They are requesting companies to refrain from creating business profiles. Businesses will be able to make their presence felt on Google+ only later this year. Until then, they can participate in Google’s business profiles trials to get a look and feel of Google+ for business.

The first thing that came to my mind though when I heard about the launch of Google+ was,  how many people are actually willing to move from Facebook to a brand new social networking website? What are the factors that you would consider that would entice you into moving from your current social networking website to another one? If you think you are quite happy to stick with your favourite social networking site, this one’s definitely the one to watch out for.

- Madhura Sabnis , Digital Marketing Assistant, The Cloud Nine Agency

Digital channels have changed the way consumers engage with their brands. There’s hardly any marketing you will come across that doesn’t have a digital element to it. It’s the social era. It’s not just the marketers’ that communicate with their audience, it’s all about the consumers marketing to other consumers via social platforms. It’s imperative to consider the need to be a part of the digital arena for all the marketers out there.

Consumers trust each other more than they trust brands. According to the IBM Institute of Business Value, a massive number of Facebook users actually “like” a brand or company on Facebook because they are mostly looking to get some sort of tangible value in the form of discounts, vouchers etc. and more importantly to engage with other consumers, read reviews and opinions of what other people from all around the world think about the brand. According to the Forrester Research, most of the consumers’ first reaction with a brand is happening online. And this is exactly why it is important to make sure you get in there too, in the circle of trust and engage with your customers. Consumer behaviour is shifting; it all starts with your consumers.

Integrate your campaigns. It’s all about mixing it up. Gone are the days of just putting up a billboard in a busy city square. McDonald’s launched an interactive billboard campaign that allowed users to play a game of digital pong with winners receiving free food at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant. It required users to simply enter a URL into their mobile phone browsers, let the smartphone’s geolocation confirm that they are in the area, and the game begins. with the user controlling the billboard’s pong game with their smartphone.

CocaCola has always been at the forefront when it comes to digital and social media and integrating online and offline channels to come up with brilliant campaigns that are clever, engaging and true to their advertising slogan, “Open happiness”. This campaign was recently launched in Israel where CocaCola used Facebook places to encourage people to recycle their old bottles. Users were also encouraged to check in to the spots dedicated for recycling and take photos as they recycled their old bottles. The winner was crowned “The Recycling King”.

Don’t just think of digital marketing as an add-on. Think of it as a part of your integrated marketing campaign.

The world has gone social. It has gone digital. Your consumers’ media habits are changing; so must your strategy.

Don’t be left behind. Go on, be a part of the change.

-Madhura Sabnis , Digital Marketing Assistant, The Cloud Nine Agency