Comscore Reveals Online Advertising Growth

by Nick Egner

It’s no surprise that the world of online video is growing. However, this also includes online video  marketing. What? People are actually watching commercials on their computers?

Comscore just released January’s 2012 U.S. online video rankings. It shows that 84% of the U.S. internet audience viewed online video. Guess what? Google sites ranked number one in unique viewers. Shocking. When the report reads “Google sites” they might as well say YouTube. Not only is YouTube number one, but they control 83% of total viewers for the month. That’s 151,989,000 people in the month of January alone! The next closest? The music video property VEVO who snagged 51,499,000 unique viewers. Something interesting about VEVO is that they also run the most popular partner channel within Youtube with a total of 50,563,000 unique viewers. People are clearly watching music videos. You hear that MTV? 

Americans viewed 5.6 billion video ads in January. Hulu is at the top of this list with 1.4 billion ad impressions with 652 million ads viewed. Video ads reached 47% of the total U.S. population! Video ads accounted for 12.2% of all videos viewed and .9% of all minutes spent viewing video. That might not seem like a staggering statistic, but when asked, consumers find on-line video ads to be 38% more memorable than ads on traditional television. Television is still king, but online video ad content is making growth. 

With over 1/2 of the entire U.S. population tuning into on-line video content, it's safe to assume that on-line video advertising will continue to be a lucrative area for marketers. 

How about you? Have you ever watched advertisements online? 

Video Post: New Twitter Advertising Policy

Tweet all about it! Businesses will now be able to create promoted tweets similar to Facebook. To kick off their new strategy, Twitter had partnered with American Express. For more on this join Natalie as she gives us the rundown in today's Daily Axioms.

Consumer Life Changes: Creating Brand Evangelists

by Mike Reiber

Major life changes spell sales opportunities. Why? Most consumers' buying and shopping habits are based on rote behaviors.

One of the key tenets of our publicity-based marketing model is to identify those occasions when consumer behavior patterns will be disrupted. Why? Consumer shopping habits and brand loyalties are likely in flux. How do we do this? We use in-depth interviews and focus groups to identify and map the key life change events for out clients' high opportunity customer segments. The problem is that major life change events such as a home purchase or new baby quickly become a matter of public record triggering a tsunami of marketing offers.

The real key, however, is being able to predict the life change events before they happen. We typically enlist our clients' customer service staff and channel partners in this process. We work with them to mine data provided by customers and use it to predict when they may be entering the pre-purchase research process. No it's not easy. Often, we enlist outside analytics resources to help us recognize patterns that are invisible to our naked eyes. In addition, we burn the midnight oil to develop and execute programs that provide meaningful and memorable rewards to consumers during their life changes. Last, we create touch points such as enthusiast clubs which allow us to follow-up with consumers and provide reinforcement for the switch they've made.

The payoff? A new customer who has the potential to become a brand evangelist.