If Interactivity is the Way, Personalized Video is the Technology…

Earlier this month, MarketingSherpa released a report stating that marketers want more interactivity in video ads. Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?

We’ve talked about this before at Real Time Content, but the online viewing experience is completely different than the linear experience viewers have when they’re watching a linear medium like TV. Seriously, how much interaction do you have with the television while you’re lying on the couch?! On the Web, you have the full keyboard and computer screen so you’re more apt to interact with and maintain control over the content you consume.

According to MarketingSherpa’s post, 73% of video marketers said that interactivity increases the effectiveness of an ad. This is comparable to the differences in teaching tactics between telling and showing. Were you an avid listener and note taker during a lecture, or the type of person to ask questions and engage the professor in dialogue? Many people learn by doing, and with interactive advertising, you’re not just telling a viewer that a product is cool; you’re actually inviting them to learn about the brand by interacting with branded content. The interactive experience is similar to the dialogue between student and professor, in which the viewer impacts the type of content and how it is received through their engagement with the content.

It’s interesting to see how marketing is shifting and taking advantage of integrating different Web technologies to give the viewer a greater interactive experience. Another finding from the survey was that 66% of marketers agreed that developing different personalized versions of an ad, geared to the individual, increases ad effectiveness. This takes interactivity to the next level of personalization, whereby the content presented is customized for the audience member based on their profile, behavior or preferences. Since viewers can relate to personalized content, it is more appealing and increases the likelihood that they will want to interact with it. No longer is advertising a method of broadcasting product information, the Web is forcing marketers to reevaluate their tactics and develop new ways to start a conversation with their consumers by increasing advertising engagement.

Tags: Advertising, Interaction, MarketingSherpa, Research, Video
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Suddenly, Three Innovations Turn Up!

The last few weeks have seen some fascinating innovations. Google’s Wave shows one view of what email (or more widely, electronic communication) would look like if it was invented now. Wolfram Research’s Alpha shows just how powerful applied computation can be at answering questions, and gives a glimpse of a very intriguing future for knowledge-based computing. Now these things tend to come in threes, and up until now, I was waiting for the third…

So I was not entirely surprised to read Steve Smith’s excellent blog post in MediaPost’s Behavioural Insider, where he talks about something that I can only inadequately describe as an ‘opinion collator,’ from New York-based start-up company Jodange. You can try out the basic idea in three iGoogle Gadgets that track opinons on Energy, The Economic Recovery, and the S&P 500, but the really interesting bit is the ‘Top of Mind’ service, which applies linguistic analysis and collation capability to topics that you choose, rather than presets. You can think of the service as a summary of the collective online opinions, sentiments and feelings of a large number of people – the sort of thing that it would take a lot of effort to determine by reading very widely. And note those words: opinion, sentiment, feeling – these are difficult things to measure reliably.

Written opinions are interesting because they are the carefully crafted and considered result of people thinking, in contrast to the more visceral and immediate behaviors that are what people do, often without thinking too deeply. Online advertising is always looking for ways to infer opinion from behavior, and whilst there is plenty of technology to determine online behavior, opinion has, until now, been a much more intangible metric. Combining what we know about measuring the behaviors of people with metrics for opinions could be a very interesting approach, and one that I’m sure we will see in the future.

Tags: Innovation, Measurement, MediaPost, Research
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Striking While the Iron’s Hot: RTC Makes A Splash in Innovation

Real Time Content recently submitted for and was honored to win in the 2009 Internet Advertising Competition awards. Our entry, “The New Age of Personalization: Matching Message to Need,” won the Best Insurance Rich Media Online Campaign category.

The submission was the demo for our Nationwide Home Insurance campaign, which resulted in a click-through rate increase of 240% and a sales increase of 50%, proving that personalized video really makes a difference in the advertiser’s bottom line.

Presented by the Web Marketing Association, the Internet Advertising Competition awards are given to agencies and technologies for outstanding achievement in Internet advertising. The IAC award is one of the only competitions to recognize only online categories of advertising. Some of the Best in Show winners included campaigns from Atmosphere BBDO, Agency.com and AvatarLabs. See a list of all the winners here. The Web Marketing Association is a leader insetting a high standard for Internet marketing and Web development.

Real Time Content’s technology evangelist, Martin Russ, was also given a Certificate of Recognition for the Advertising Research Foundation’s 2009 Great Mind Awards in the category of Innovation. The awards are presented to individuals who have developed innovative research ideas – methodology, theory, service and solution.

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is a collective of diverse marketing experts, including 400 advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms and media companies, that are all tied by the a single thread of staying true to innovation and creativity in advertising to lead the industry forward.

Tags: Awards, Innovation, Personalization, Real Time Content, Research
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Video: The Silver Lining in Projected Online Ad Spend

Earlier this month, Forrester released a report on “European Online Advertising Through 2013” . Although the overall outlook was a little gloomy, slowing online ad growth to just 10% in 2009, rich media and video advertising is predicted to grow tremendously, up to 59% of the online display ad space by 2013.

In an interview with ClickZ , the report’s author and principal analyst at Forrester, Nate Elliot, said that the economy’s effect on inventory costs and demand traditional display formats will actually boost spend in new and rich media advertising. “People are making assumptions based on the downturn of 2002, but display, and online as a whole are in a different position now. After the last downturn, online bounced back faster than offline, and it’s in better shape today than it was then.”

Even if 2013 isn’t for another 4 years, we still think that now is video’s moment to shine, in the European AND U.S. markets. LiveRail , an online video ad network, recently published a “State of the Industry” report on the online video ad industry that forecasts US video ad spend to go from $876 million this year to $1,226 million in 2010. While advertisers may be down with the economic climate, we have high hopes and expectations for video, this year and for many more in the future.

Tags: Advertising, Forrester, Research, Video
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