The most effective tool for Digital Branding: Online Videos

It is estimated that the total number of internet user in India is more than 100 M, who spend on an average 16 hours per week online i.e. close to 10% of their total time in a week. No brand marketer can afford to ignore the above stats, hence digital branding slowly becoming an integral part of the marketing budget. The belief that online advertising has limited or no value to a marketing campaign and it’s not a medium to increase brand image, doesn't hold water today.

The research done by MSN, the Internet Standards Bureau (ISB) and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) on Unilever's Dove Nutrium bar has revealed that in order to achieve a better result and even without increasing the cost of the campaign, 10-15% brand advertising budget should be on web. The study shows that in a media mix, boosting the frequency of the online campaign can cost effectively increase the effect of a branding campaign. With the advent of social media, the effectiveness of building brand online has increased manifold.

Knowing the fact that online is the way, the next biggest challenge in front of a brand marketer is to decide how to go about it. Where to pump in money, is it search or display? Let us try to explore the option here. As we know search is intent based and is capable of targeting people just the right stage of decision making process. Hence, search is one of the best options for response marketers. But as a brand building tool display outruns search because of the higher recall than the search.

Amongst the innumerable options in display advertising, online video advertising has turned out to be a clear winner in terms of brand recall, engagement and influencing user to start the buying cycle. An Interactive marketer will bank on online video to get benefitted from the branding potential richer than that for previous online display ad formats. Recently done study shows that more than half (53%) of respondents who recalled seeing some advertising remembered viewing these in-stream ads. Check the graph below:

If we look at the above chart closely, we will come to know that the permeating nature of banner ads also have an impact on brand recall. Because of the pervasiveness 35% of users have reported to recall seeing static banner ad compare to 13% of user who remembered seeing engaging video banners. This result may disappoint many considering the fact that videos are very high on engagement, but the underlying fact is that a user is exposed more to the static banner than online video banners. Let us compare the effectiveness of the two in engaging the user and making the user to interact with the ads. Please check the below graph:

Please note the ability of expandable video banners to prompt user to interact with the ads vis-à-vis banner ads.

Online advertising is in India is far from becoming mature; hence there is a huge possibility of seeing more innovative ad units in time to come. But today, brand marketers have found a solution in the form of interactive online video banners in order to engage, influence, and prompt user to interact with the ad.