How many times have we, as marketers, heard that video is the next frontier?
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple years, this is what I’m talking about:
- For B2B Marketers, Video Represents a Golden Opportunity
- Why Mobile Video (Advertising) Will Eat the World
- Digital Video Advertising to Grow at Annual Double-Digit Rates
The need for digital video stems from consumer habits. According to Statista.com, consumers spend an average of 72 minutes watching digital videos per day.
Wow.
I mean, I know the baby goats and puppies are sweet, but over an hour A DAY, y’all? C’mon.
As marketers are aware, we can’t ignore numbers like that. When consumers are headed toward something like video in large droves, we can’t help ourselves. We must go there, too.
You can hardly blame us. We want to serve relevant, impactful content to the audiences who matter most to our clients. And, if we’re targeting basically anyone on earth, they are on social media. Watching videos. Right now.
Seriously.
But, I shouldn’t have to tell you, there are potential issues with advertisers flocking to digital video in equally large droves. In this AdWeek article from late 2016, Anna Bager predicts the biggest opportunities and challenges for digital video in 2017. In it, she acknowledges an IAB Ad Blocking Study and reminds advertisers that consumers are annoyed by advertisements that delay or obscure access to the content they’re trying to view.
In a recent article for Digiday, Lucia Moses, builds on this idea: “Advertisers love digital video more than users.”
Whoops. Looks like we ruined something else.
To combat this, let’s remember the big native advertising boom from a few years back. We wanted to provide content that consumers would find useful and would not appear as a traditional advertisement (which consumers are adept at tuning out).
Instead of mass producing videos because that’s what consumers are craving or adding lengthy advertisements to the beginning of videos that already exist, let’s focus on videos with which consumers want to engage.
As Moses points out, there’s still more demand for good video than there is supply:
If you’re talking about making real money on video, though, it’s premium, high-quality video programming that creates an emotional connection with people that drives the highest rates and most revenue, and few traditional publishers have cracked that.
Video is a great opportunity for some marketers, but it’s not for everyone. While it’s hard to ignore the numbers, weigh the pros and cons and only publish something you’re proud of. Your targeted audience will respond to high-quality content, whether it’s blog posts, gifs, photos, white papers or videos.
Only you can decide which is best for your consumers. Don’t let the trendy content of 2017 sway you away from what you know.
