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Blog

Don’t Recycle & Other Video Best Practices

Posted Jan 17, 2017

Captivating users on their most personal devices requires a different approach. Not only are things perceived differently on smaller screens, but the entire viewer experience and setting is different.

These nuances are why we launched the Native Video Fund a couple years ago and analyzed over 11 billion ad impressions last year. Recently, eMarketer released a report revealing their digital video advertising best practices for 2017. Here are the highlights:

Don’t recycle.
Simply trimming a 30-second television spot into a 15 won’t guarantee that it will perform well. As noted in the study, advertisers are “advising against” the age-old habit of “repurposing television ads for digital”. As Kenneth Blorn of BuzzFeed advocates:

“The most important thing is that we not treat all platforms the same, because you go to them for different reasons. You go to them maybe all within the same day, but you have a different behavioral expectation, so we need to create content that meets those expectations.”

Creatives need to be designed to hook users in the first few seconds, leveraging close-ups and quick cuts. Otherwise, viewers are apt to skip, tab-away, or otherwise disengage. In the words of Jay Friedman of Goodway Group:

“Build your spots so they convey everything you need to convey in 5 seconds, and that the next 10 or 25 seconds are bonus time. I see so many video ads today that within 5 seconds they’re still doing the build-up.”

Focus on performance.
Historically, traditional commercials were created with a focus on driving brand awareness. However, as digital and mobile advertising enables immediate audience interaction and campaign tracking, so the eMarketer study noted that experts now “advocate the use of video to drive more concrete outcomes.”

Personalize with smart targeting.
Running with a single ad creative simply doesn’t cut it on mobile. Advertisers who leverage advanced audience targeting and deliver custom creatives for each segment enjoy much higher engagement rates than those who don’t. Just as publishers see better user adoption when they go beyond translation and offer true localization, so advertisers enjoy higher conversion rates when their creatives are catered to each market group.

As Ofri Ben-Porat advocates, “When I see a video ad and you see a video ad, it should be a different ad for the same product.”

While the full study offers numerous additional digital video advertising best practices, these three are key: cessation of recycling creative, designing with performance in mind, and customizing for niche audiences.

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