It’s Time For You To Do
Programmatic Video

Video advertising on the web is huge business right now, growing at an exponential rate. And why wouldn’t it? As consumers, we’re watching more video online than we ever have. If you’ve considered advertising your business with video, my goal is to convince you to take the leap.

Let’s start with some stats

• 83% of US internet users watch online video at least once a month. Source: Forbes
• Users are exposed to 32.2 videos each month. Source: comScore
• Top consumers are 18 – 24 years old, and they watch an average of 213 videos per month.
  
  That comes out to over 19 hours of video per month. Source: comScore

That’s a lot of video! Users are getting very used to consuming video and that means there’s a lot of opportunity for advertisers to get their message in front of potential customers.

Of course, online video isn’t a new phenomenon. 93% of marketing professionals used online video in their strategies back in 2013. And even then, 82% of them found video to be an effective marketing strategy. Source: ReelSEO

And videos are memorable too. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading text. Source: Insivia

If you’ve been using content marketing or other text based advertising, it’s probably frustrating to realize that 90% of your message isn’t being remembered. Isn’t being memorable the whole goal of advertising? It might be time to leverage the power of video.

And it’s not just videos on our computers that we’re watching either. 75% of consumers use smartphones to watch online video and 87% use tablets. Source: IDG Global Solutions

That means more inventory and more opportunity for business owners who want to reach consumers online.

Now let’s talk about video advertisements, the most common being the pre-roll ad. That’s a video ad that plays immediately before another video. These are the videos you see right before that hilarious cat video on YouTube or before that news story on your local news site.

Most people know these as “the video ads you have to watch in order watch the video that you really want to watch.”

But thank goodness for these ads really! And a big thank you to advertisers who invest in video advertising, and subsidize the cost of hosting those free cat videos. Right? And if it weren’t for you we’d probably have to pay a monthly subscription to YouTube and our other favorite sites and all those free apps we download would start costing us money.

So do these video ads work?

There’s no better way to answer a question like that than with some more stats.

• 80% of internet users recall watching a video ad in the past thirty days. Source: ReelSEO
• 46% of them took action on the video advertisement. Source: Reel SEO

— 26% looked for more information about the subject of the ad.
— 22% visited the website named in the ad.
— 15% visited the company represented in the ad.
— 12% actually purchased the product featured in the ad.
Source: Online Publishers Association

And finally I’ll give you this awesome stat that comes directly from what we’ve seen here at Simpli.fi: Even when given the opportunity to skip the ad after five seconds, about a fourth of viewers will watch pre-roll ads to the end.

Now I don’t know about you, but this surprised me. I would’ve thought that everyone was skipping the ads, but then I started looking at my own behavior and realized that yah, I skip the Nationwide and AT&T pre-roll ads. (I’m already a customer of both.) The video ads that I do watch are the ones about Jeeps and local restaurants and movie trailers – the stuff that I’m actually interested in.

Or said another way, I skip ads that don’t interest me, but don’t mind sitting through a 30 second ad for something that is relevant to me.

Are you convinced?

Let me know if you’ve used online video advertising and what your experience has been.

Thanks for reading.

David McBee

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