• Almost 50% of Europeans now have an internet connection

• 9 hours per week spent on the web in 2008, up 27% from 2004 – more time than people spent reading print media, watching movies or playing video games

• North South divide in Europe: Nordic countries have an internet penetration rate of 76% on average, compared to 45% in Southern Europe

• Internet consumption set to overtake traditional TV in June 2010 – 2.5 days per month spent on internet versus 2 days on traditional TV: but does not signify decline in TV- simply a shift in how it is consumed

• Online video established as most popular online audiovisual entertainment application, with more than 1 in 4 (28%) Europeans and over 300 million people worldwide watching short or full-length videos on the internet

• PC and mobile growing in popularity as alternative screens for TV and digital content: as users increasingly access the internet through IPTV, games consoles and mobile phones, so the time spent on the internet using a PC will drop from 95% today to 50% over the next 5 years

Internet usage keeps increasing worldwide and the number of people logging on is greater as is the amount of time spent online. Microsoft predicts that by 2010, the Internet will overtake traditional TV as the most used form of media. It’s important to mention, however, that this does not signify the decline in TV but the way in which people are experiencing viewing TV content.

And this leads directly to the meaning of the phrase ‘the three screens that will dominate’: TV, PC and mobile. It is due to this increase in Internet usage that people are spending more and more time viewing both broadband content as well as live and recorded TV through alternative channels.

Broadband penetration and providers offering high-speed access to the Net, have also given way to the rise of online cosumption and if we refer back to our 5th pointer in the introduction, online video is becoming one of the most popular forms of viewing entertaining with 1 in 4 or 28% of Europeans watching short or full-length videos.

There is no doubt corporate branding is as important in relation to the Internet as in all other walks of life, and the continued growth and geographic spread of the Internet is obviously important as the figures relating to e-commerce are themselves interesting.

The value of the Internet lies no longer in its use as a giant online mall but as a massive information highway where the exchange of information and feedback is free.

The option to watch streaming video on TV is a huge step towards the merge of television and Internet, a development that was up to now held back by lack of processor speed and CPU power requirements.

At 77 we can’t help pointing out that we’re moving towards an age where we, as marketers, chose only the video content we advertise on and completely disregard the time slot it would appear in. Within a few years, there will be no need for TiVo or TV guide as all the programs will be on-demand. Market research will have to be more accurate to identify viewers of programs and their interests, but targeted marketing can be much more precise. Christmas holidays 2007 might be a good time to consider how you will use on-demand TV as a marketing vehicle.

The research was conducted in the USA and select European countries. To no surprise, USA users generally seemed less forward in their use of mobile content than their European counterparts, specifically when it comes to user generated content.

Numbers like these show that early adopters are en masse moving many of their activities to their mobiles. And it is absolutely crucial that marketers adapt to this. Many platforms are opening their mobile content to advertising (most recently MSN Mobile) and it’s time to jump on the band wagon. If you’re not developing mobile advertisements yet, get to it.

• One in four students are willing to forward a viral
• Two thirds of all young people will be exposed to a viral, on average
• The attitude towards virals is more positive than towards TV commercials (2.8 vs. 2.4)*
• Evasion rate is smaller for virals than for TV advertisements (3.0 vs. 3.3)*

* Scale of 1-5 – 1 is very negative or low evasion, 5 is very positive or high evasion.

The complete result will be published in the December issue of Adforesult and will be posted on the website of De Vos en Jansen within two weeks.

From Searchcowboys (Dutch).

That seems like quite a bit of content, but many channels only have trailers and teasers so far. And we do not think that 30 second advertisements preceding a two minute trailer will be a great success. For this to become interesting for advertisers, Bebo is going to need to bring more quality content. Now it only seems to be an advertising opportunity for the partner channels, that all place links to their own sites on their Bebo pages.

Google is using its bidding system to fill the (little) TV advertising space they own in the US. According to the Times, they have been getting positive feedback on their system, so we can safely assume that Google is looking for ways to implement the system in Europe as well. Over here, the market is much more fractured, though. Google has a lot of experience with targeting, however, so when online data has completely merged with TV – something bound to happen – Google will be on the frontline to take care of selling targeting advertising space on the new TV channel.

(table from China Internet Watch)

Baidu has access to approximately 160,000 websites in its advertisers program. The video ads take one of three forms, which can be viewed at CIW (see link above). Google is, according to us, still experimenting with its video ad formats but will soon have to decide which way to go. A video ad in a Google advertisement space was spotted on YouTube last Friday, but that seemed hardly the way to go for the future.

As Clickz rightly points out, there seems to be a new company every month that promises to be able to automatically analyze the content of a video. This month, that company is called Digitalsmiths. The company claims to be able to analyze a video by scanning it frame-by-frame, analyzing the audio and, of course, the tags and META elements. The general idea about this product across the net is ‘we’ll have to see it first’ and we at 77 must agree with that.

Background

As we have said before, the success of video advertising will largely depend on the advertising being targeted. Online video marketing can distinguish itself from traditional TV marketing by attaching the appropriate ads to the diverse video content. Targeted video advertising is only possible when we can accurately analyze the content of online videos.

At 77 we doubt if we can ever completely rely on computers to analyze the content of a video accurately. What is more important, the content of a video might have nothing to do with the intentions of its viewers, especially if the video is analyzed frame-by-frame. For example: attributes – let’s say a car – in a video can be in every frame and can even be part of a conversation, without any of the viewers having a special interest in cars.

As soon as we have a decent example of this new technology at work, it will be posted here.

When it comes to in-video ads, a study by Advertising.com and InsightExpress indicates that people prefer to watch shorter ads. Not a big surprise: people will usually want to watch as little advertisements as possible, when you ask them. 77 thinks the key lies in offering relevant and entertaining ads.

The study was performed on a sample group that was a little too small for our taste, but gave a bit of insight on the preferences of online video users nonetheless. For example, news content was most popular by far, with 62 percent of the respondents searching news videos during the survey period. Movie trailers and music videos were second and third with 38 and 36 percent respectively. These were followed by TV shows, user-created videos, movies and sports clips.

The respondents made clear that they preferred shorter ads to longer ones. As the preferred content here was news, this is not a surprise. It’s hard to make advertisements that are relevant to the content and entertaining at the same time. While waiting for a study that uses larger numbers of respondents, we think it would be wise to produce entertaining marketing messages and focus on entertaining content to run it with.

eMarketer reports today that Return on Investment for online campaigns is experienced by advertisers worldwide as much higher than the ROI of traditional media. The following graph from eMarketer is based on a research by SEMPO.

It’s important to see this in the right light: figures like these do not mean we should all move to the (mobile) Internet at once, abandoning all other communication channels. Like we said before, a marketing campaign is most effective when it is spread across various media. Marketers should keep this in mind when allocating a budget. In any sense, television, phones, radio and Internet will eventually merge into one medium that will be accessible from anywhere. And the only choice for advertisers will be on which functions of this ‘Supernet’ to advertise.