Yesterday Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer released his annual seven predictions for the New Year and we may be a bit bias, but we think his predictions are great!
Focusing on the elements of the article that speak to web video, here is a short summary of Mr. Ramsey’s predictions for 2010. (We’ve bolded the parts we like best).
“During 2010, as US ad budgets crack open just a little, look for an accelerated migration of ad dollars from traditional to digital media. According to Forrester Research, 59% of US marketers plan to increase their budgets for digital by pulling funds from traditional outlets. Other sources support this shift, including a recent survey among Association of National Advertisers members and a separate study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.”
Traditional ad outlets just can’t reach the type and size of targeted audience that digital can, and it’s great to know that more and more marketers are pulling away from these methods and investing more in digital. This is supported by Ramsey’s next statement, “Next year, while broadcast television, radio, newspaper and magazine spending continue to downsize, though more slowly than in 2009, online ad spending will enjoy a nice bump-up: eMarketer currently forecasts 5.5% growth. And the increase won’t all come from search—banner ads will grow 3.3%, and online video will jump by 40%.”
Wow! It’s going to be a big big year for web video! It gets even better as Ramsey continues to say, “Other researchers and investment banks are even more bullish on digital ad spending next year, with many predicting growth rates exceeding 10%.”
In his third prediction, he states that even though “media dollars have imploded, media consumption will continue to explode. Due to increasingly empowered consumers and further advances in technology, look for media to become more:
- Distributed—the same content will pop up in multiple locations, formats and channels.
- Personalized—media will be tailored to reflect what consumers have watched, read, experienced and shared.
- Contextualized—when and where consumers get their information will dictate its content and format, and that, in turn, will shape how they interact with and share it. “
The personalized aspect also falls into Ramsey’s sixth prediction, which states, “Marketers will be increasingly willing to trade off reach for deeper engagement. This goes right along with the drive toward improved targeting and increasingly efficient media buys. Rather than try to reach every conceivable person who fits a particular demographic, marketers will be looking for technologies and ad solutions that allow them to reach only the people who—by their past surfing behavior, search queries, online purchases, social connections, Twitter posts and other digital footprints—indicate that they are likely prospects.”
So why is this good news for web video? Well, video is a big part of search marketing because people are very likely to watch a video that pops up in search results over pages of text, and videos often show up near the top of search results dependent on the number of views they have. Consumers are also more likely to share video than anything else online for the same reason that we produce videos – because they’re fun and easy to understand. This offers that deeper level of engagement that Ramsey mentions marketers are looking for.
This also leads into his seventh prediction that pop-up, unwanted, irrelevant ads online “will erode, if not fade away.” He says, “Consumers in the digital age simply have too much control over their media environments these days for marketers to be pushing unwanted banners, buttons or videos. This raises the bar for marketers and their agencies to develop new forms of messages that are not even perceived as ads, but rather as welcome content.” One of the two challenges he outlines is “To create communications that are so compelling, entertaining, informative or useful that the consumer is not only happy to receive them, but also motivated to share them with others.”
This is exactly what we feel animated web video does. So overall, video works for the empowered consumer and that is the main reason why these predictions are great news for web video.
Click here to see Geoff Ramsey’s full article on eMarketing and please let us know if you have any of your own predictions to share through comments.
