By Manish Mishra, Vice President (Sales)
Have you watched a video on your phone today?
Odds are, you have. And not just because you're interested in mobile.
Increasingly, consumers are viewing video content from their phones and tablets, when and where they want.
At the same time, advertisers are shifting budgets from TV to online and mobile.
You should too.
And to help you along the way, BuzzCity is introducing a new in-house rich media platform for video ads.
Almost One Hour a Day
Before I tell you more about our new video ad platform, let's take a closer look at the shifts in consumption and advertising.
Consumers spend about 55 minutes, on average, watching digital video every day, according to eMarketer. That's up from just 6 minutes four years ago.
Goal!
The time spent watching online videos is expected to rise further with the World Cup. Nearly 1 in 2 football fans will follow the matches from a smartphone; 18% say they will use tablets to keep up with the matches. Taken together, mobile is the most popular way to keep up with the action.
That's not surprising, considering that
(a) match times can make it difficult to watch at home
(b) it's much easier to share great clips and commentary - whether it be in person or on social media - from a mobile device and
(c) mobile is the most convenient way to check scores and watch highlights when you want to do it and
(d) watching sports has become a multi-screen experience.
Before the first goal was even scored, consumers shared World Cup ads 6.9 million times. (Take note Super Bowl fans - this pre-tourney ad share total is 31% more than Super Bowl ad shares!)
YouTube
More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube every month. They watch 6 billion hours of video. Perhaps those statistics don't faze you. But this one should: mobile accounts for almost 40% of YouTube's global watch time. That's about 2.4 billion hours of video every month.
Just two years ago, only 6% of YouTube content was viewed from a mobile device.
Advertising
With consumers spending more time online and on mobile, it's no surprise that advertisers are also shifting resources as agencies also set up new units to create digital content and convert TVCs for wider distribution.
Just this week in the United States, Honda announced that it will pull money from television ads to launch its own music-streaming channel. The car-maker also plans to create new content by sponsoring high-profile concerts and music tours. The total spend is expected to be more than US$53 million, equivalent to Honda's 2013 cable TV budget.
Honda is making the switch because it sees digital media - and video, in particular - as the best way to reach young consumers, who watch less television and often skip over the ads, thanks to digital recorders, when they do. Honda's VP of advertising and marketing, Tom Peyton, also noted that banners, text and twitter snippets don't carry the weight of a video commercial.
In 2013, brands spent nearly US$2.8 billion in the United States on digital video commercials, up 19% from a year earlier, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.
In the UK, advertisers are spending £316 million this year on digital video ads. This spend is expected double within four years.
Facebook meanwhile has just started offering video ads in seven new countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK.
BuzzCity
Which brings us now to BuzzCity's new rich media video advertising platform, which serves ads to consumers across the globe.
As you can see in the demo above, advertisers still start with a banner ad, but with a click, the banner expands into a video window.
Like other ads on our network, charges are based on Pay Per Click (PPC), so unlike many auto-play sites where advertisers are billed when a page is viewed, here you only pay if a viewer clicks the banner to watch the video.
Advertisers also have the option to target their rich media campaigns based on the type of device (smartphone or tablet) and by operating system (Android or iOS).
In my next article, I'll show you how the system works as well as some things to think about when advertising with video.
