New research by Harris Interactive for Digitas finds “an increased urgency for brand investment in online video.”

Spurred by cross-generational interest in digital video across screens, 63% of U.S. adults look at online content while watching television, rising to 71% for adults 18-44. And almost half (46%) of online video viewers are likely to seek out participating brands mentioned.

The general landscape for online video consumption according to data from comScore shows that 179 million US Internet users watched nearly 38 billion online videos in February. The vast majority, 83.8%, viewed online video, of average length 6.2 minutes. The average online ad was 0.4 minutes; video ads accounted for 16.6% of all videos viewed and 1.3% of all minutes spent viewing video online. 

Forty-nine percent of brand fans on social networks will watch a video mentioned in a post, and 53% said that if a favorite celebrity announced participation in an online video or web series, they would check it out.

While advertisers continue to spend millions at traditional TV upfronts, the Digitas survey underscores that online video is now de rigueur for consumer engagement. “Investing in online video is no longer optional. Consumers are hungry for online content and ready to take this journey with brands. And as the survey results show, today’s viewer is not just passively sitting and watching—they’re sharing, talking, clicking, testing,” says Stephanie Sarofian, Managing Director of The Third Act:, the brand content unit of Digitas. Continue reading...

When it comes to advertising dollars, TV still rules the roost. According to eMarketer, $60.5 billion per year is spent on television ads. So online video ads, which pull in $2.2 billion annually from advertisements, have a long way to go.

YouTube is trying to figure out ways to get there, according to the New York Times.

“We would love YouTube to be a much larger part of brands’ advertising budget and mix in the next year and the future than it is today,” said Lucas Watson, who was hired as YouTube’s vice president of online video global sales from Proctor & Gamble in June, the Times reports. 

Watson was P&G’s head of digital strategy and brought with him digital marketing knowledge as well as info on the packaged-goods industry, a sector that has been slow to advertise online.Continue reading...

Heineken's first worldwide campaign, dubbed "Legends," centered on YouTube, where the brand's first spot, "The Entrance," scored more than 3 million views globally in the first three weeks of its release in December.

The eagerly-awaited second instalment in the creative brand campaign, "The Date," premiered on Heineken's YouTube channel late last month, and zoomed to more than 4 million hits.

Fast forward to today, when Heineken and YouTube parent Google announced a multi-year global agreement that continues leveraging YouTube and expands to mobile.Continue reading...

Last year we wrote about interactive billboards in Japan that recalled the interactive ads featured in the Tom Cruise thriller, Minority Report. Today we bring you Immersive Labs, a New York-based advertising technology startup that produces dynamically tailored ad messages to passerby.

The anonymous facial detection is nuanced enough to parse ads by gender, age, distance, attention time and gaze, weather, time of day, and day of week. The technology is invisible to the viewer and works one-on-one or with crowds.Continue reading...

The online world has brought us the wonder of instant free global knowledge, but with it has come the reality that "free" really isn't. Often, advertising is the price the consumer pays for unfettered access to a vast wealth of information.

Now, it seems, that same principle is being tested with pretty much the last ad-free medium available — books. Publishers and authors have long resisted placing ads in printed books, but with the e-book market rapidly growing in acceptance, the publishing model not only might change; it is changing.Continue reading...

A whopping two billion videos a day are watched on YouTube — and if you've ever watched one, you probably wondered, "How the heck does YouTube make money showing free videos?"

It's a valid question that five-year-old video portal has itself asked since its founding in February 2005. It's the question its owner, Google, has wrestled with for the last 18 months, when Google started to really focus on YouTube's revenue.

Now, it seems, the answer is essentially the same answer you'd get when you ask how Google itself makes money — it's all about the ads.Continue reading...

The online world has become so established and embedded in our routines, it’s easy to forget that it’s still in many ways a wild-west frontier town where scams proliferate, bad guys lurk and justice is rough and uneven.

The SPAM mail carrying a virus is a well known foe of good Netizens. But the latest wave of shadowy schemes involves malvertising – using online display ads to disseminate destructive code. Today’s Online Media Daily details the story of a malvertiser who subscribed to the old notion that the best way to break into the house is to walk in through the front door with a smile.

A rogue group operating under the name BellasInteractive hung out its shingle as a legit ad agency based in San Jose, CA, specializing in major online media buys. Unlike some other malvertisers, their approach was slick from the website to their letters of incorporation and references.Continue reading...

Those personalized response interactive ads in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report aren't so futuristic any more.