The power of social video

Study DVJ Insights & University of Groningen: effect of video on brand recognition and message transfer

Lucas Hulsebos – CEO & Mark Vroegrijk – Senior Methodologist

For decades we have known that the use of video can have a huge reinforcing effect on the results of a campaign. We also know that the chance your video is seen – due to the increasing battle for attention – is no longer self-evident. Byron Sharp says that 80% of the deployment of TV is wasted money because creatives aren’t noticed, or the video isn’t linked to a brand. The latter is again mainly caused by insufficient viewing.

SWITCHING CHANNELS

Let’s get back to insufficient viewing for a sec. The question we often ask marketeers is why they still evaluate a video after a commercial is fully watched. We know that consumers don’t, and preferably click away or switch channels as fast as possible? For a long time we’ve thought that the effects weren’t as bad, through forcing attention by using a pre-roll. Still, when we look at a couple of conclusions surrounding video, we see the following:

• 70% of digital videos on YouTube is watched on mobile (source: Google)
• 90% of social media is consumed through mobile (source: Facebook)
• 50% of companies still use a shortened version of a television commercial (source: Facebook)
• The most important metric used to measure the strength and effectiveness of digital videos are engagement statistics such as CTR, CR (source: The CMO Council)
• It’s not allowed to use a strategy for videos that can’t be skipped for videos with a duration of >25 seconds (source: Google)

For many brands, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, play a considerable role in their advertising strategies. According to recent figures obtained from the bi-annual CMO Survey, an average firm spends about 12% of its total marketing budget on social media. In addition, with marketeers in the CMO Survey predicting this figure to approximately double in the next five years, social media marketing isn’t a phenomenon that is expected to vanish anytime soon.

MORE BROWSING THAN WATCHING

The rising prominence of social media in advertising isn’t too surprising given consumers’ changing media usage. For example, the share of daily Facebook users is higher than that of TV users (50% versus 39%, respectively), and the average consumer spends more time browsing social media each day than watching TV (about a 15-minute difference). As such, social media compares favourably to a traditionally dominant medium such as TV, by offering high potential reach – and by being audio visual in nature as well.

Because of this, advertisers increasingly complement their TV advertising efforts by placing video advertisements on social media platforms as well. In some instances, these videos are even the exact same ones as those broadcasted on TV. However, this raises the question: will social media video advertisements also be similarly effective as TV ads in improving consumers’ brand knowledge and attitudes?

The effectiveness of social video advertisements

To gain more insight into this question, DVJ Insights set up an internal study in cooperation with the University of Groningen, across three countries (Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom), to see how consumers engage with social video advertisements, and how these advertisements affect brand recognition and message recall.

What we did: in an online survey we presented a set of mobile websites to each of the 5,000+ respondents (with some being mock-up social media feeds with one out of ±100 possible video ads incorporated), which could then be browsed through at the respondent’s convenience. We tracked the time each video was kept ‘in focus’ by the respondent. After having browsed through each website, we asked them which brands and messages they remembered seeing.

A few interesting results:

• The average consumer pays attention for less than two (i.c. 1.8) seconds to a typical
• social video ad
• Even for the best-performing ads, the average consumer’s attention span never exceeds
• 5 seconds
• Willingness to watch an ad is 3x lower for social media compared to TV
• 7% watches a social media ad in its entirety, versus 65% for TV
• Unaided brand recall (after seeing the ads) is 13% for social, versus 48% for TV
• Aided brand recall (after seeing the ads) is 40% for social, versus 71% for TV

Standing out

The lower scores of social video advertisements – compared to TV commercials – with respect to recall are perhaps not too surprising, given that consumers also lose attention way more quickly when watching these videos – remember the less-than-2-seconds average viewing time! This not only makes it important for marketeers to make their social video advertisements stand out immediately, but also to include a clear brand cue as soon as possible. Our study reveals that such a practice indeed produces (significant) positive results: we find that among advertisements of which the first brand cue appears within the 2-second mark (i.e. before consumers generally scroll further along the feed), unaided brand recall levels are 1.4 times as high as those for advertisements of which the first brand cue only appears after two seconds.

A great competitor. Or is it?

While social video advertising has become a great competitor to TV advertising in terms of reach, it can’t command the same attention (and moreover: attention-holding) to make an impact in the mind of the consumer. However, the potential benefits of targeting social video advertisements to a specific audience are undeniable. And: the variation between the different advertisements that were tested in our study reveal that with the right creative execution and branding, social video advertisements can also be very successful in shifting consumers’ knowledge of, and attitudes towards, a brand.

The first 1,5 seconds

A realistic environment is needed to test video advertisements and measure the real ‘stopping power’, the impact on memory and creative quality. However, this realistic environment goes beyond the possibility to skip the advertisement. The study must be conducted on mobile and take this volatile way of consuming into account. It’s important that not just the study is adjusted to the medium – but also the creative. Don’t fall into the trap of watching a creative in its entirety first. We advise every marketer to base the first impression of a new social video on the first 1,5 seconds. Only then when it’s appealing enough to continue watching and clear who the message is from, the creative can be optimised further.

This article was previously published in Clou Magazine.