On an average night, you see 15 minutes of commercials for every hour of TV you watch. In those 15 minutes you see about 30 commercials, half of which are actually relevant to you. Currently, businesses spend an average of $100,000 to produce just one commercial, which they then have to pay to broadcast at specific timeslots.
After all the time, money and manpower it takes to get those 15 minutes of advertising to consumers, a large portion of those commercials don't even reach the right audience. While the only current solutions are expensive market research and guesstimations, there is one solution people rarely think of: mobile video advertising. From more accurate and detailed targeting to direct and real-time feedback from the consumer, mobile video ads or “mobile commercials” have the technology, data and edge to put the right ads in front of you.
Targeting Consumers with New Tools
Broadcast television has led the way in video advertising for the last 50 plus years. However, the last five decades of commercials have been based on “Nielson” ratings gathered from the viewing habits of 25,000 households, while there are more than 114 million TV-watching households in the US alone. With the limited data on consumer habits, no wonder you're not seeing the right commercials! Simply by spending one third the cost, via mobile video ads, companies can get their 30-second sell in front of targeted consumers—with specific targeting parameters such as gender, age, location, date and time.
In many cases, mobile video ads can even be targeted based on user interests, spending habits, search browsing habits, and previous or recent purchases, making it more likely to reach the right viewers. Imagine if you just came home with your new iPad 2, turned on the TV and saw nothing but iPad 2 accessory and app commercials. Mobile commercials make this type of direct-to-consumer advertising work like magic!
Better tracking with the Consumer in Mind
The reason you are not seeing the right commercials on TV is due to poor targeting and poor data collection. Probably the most powerful aspect, mobile technology is able to provide a vast amount of data that could never be captured by traditional broadcast ads. Through mobile video ads, the advertiser can specifically target customers and further optimize each campaign by using all the statistical information captured via mobile.
Here are just some of the user data captured from mobile video ads:
- Type of mobile device: Advertisers can use this information to accurately format video commercials for what devices their customers are using.
- User Location: Advertisers can match user location to statistical databases to find their right audience.
- View Date/Time: Finding out when your consumers are watching is key in any marketing campaign, especially if you want to be wise with both ad timing and your advertising budget.
- Level of Completion: Knowing exactly when consumers stopped watching tells the advertiser where the commercial falls flat.
Now imagine you're a single guy in your 20's watching TV when a Tampax commercial comes on. Wouldn't you love to be able to let their marketing department know that you're not a woman, you don't have a wife, and exactly how many seconds into the commercial you either left the room or changed the channel? This is information the creators of TV commercials never get; but mobile video advertisers can very accurately optimize their ads for everyone's benefit.
People Share What They Like
Another innovative way mobile technology is changing the video advertising space is through social networks and direct feedback. You've likely never called a friend after seeing a really awesome commercial that’s relevant to both of you, but I'm sure you've shared a funny ad with your friends online, or commented about ads you didn't like. Your social actions and feedback is also part of the data mobile advertisers can use to maximize their marketing dollars.
When an advertiser combines targeting with a creative mobile commercial, the right consumers see the ad and are much more likely to share or comment on it. This method provides more bang for the buck for the advertiser, because less money is being wasted on inaccurate leads due to poor targeting. Additionally, sharing and comment exposure is mostly free. Some advertisers are paying for social network promotion, but the reality is that if your product and marketing is good, the users will do their part.
One company that has been able to successfully combine video ads with sharing is Pandora. Although this effort is not mobile, it's a good example of video ads in their early stage. Pandora already allows a listener to share or comment on the music they're listening to, so doing the same on video ads shown during their experience, is a natural extension for the user. This type of evolution is what's necessary to bring advertisers to mobile users.
A Good Start, and an Even Greater Future
Currently, mobile video advertising is in its infancy, but with the right mobile marketing partner advertisers can finally get consumers the ads they want to see. The more targeted the ads, the more likely they’ll buy what you're selling.
Here at CornerBlue we are providing cutting-edge mobile video advertising to our clients, immersing their brand into the mobile world. With simple click-to-video campaigns, where the user clicks on a banner ad and a mobile commercial starts, our clients have seen the power and cost-effectiveness of mobile video targeting.
The outlook for mobile video advertising is filled with potential, thanks to all the new technologies within smartphones and tablets that allow advertisers to embed videos and track consumers’ activity via these mobile commercials. With an industry that is growing and ever-evolving, our team is focused on staying on top of new tools and technologies that better allow us to serve our clients' mobile marketing needs. Hopefully, within the next six months we will see the boom in both large and small retailers jumping on the mobile video bandwagon with even better commercials than ever!
Hear-hear! We have a new interactive media environment but no advertising model that understands the viewer and capitalizes on the interactivity. That's akin to doing audio only commercials when TV came on the scene because that's how it was done on radio.
Marketers and Advertisers and still trying to fit the round peg of digital into the square hole of traditional media.
Wake up and smell the broadband! It's a 2-way communication now!