Why Video Advertising is Important for Brands?

Why Video Advertising is Important for Brands?

  04:33    Silver Push

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Video offers a dynamic and vibrant form of content to people. From silent films to feature films to online videos, videos have always fascinated audiences and served as one of the best means for delivering a message to the masses.

Online video advertising helps brands to communicate their messages to consumers in a highly captivating way. The following reasons will help explain why brands should adopt video advertising by leveraging the expertise of video advertising companies -

Video is immensely popular

People love to watch videos and they are increasingly watching online videos on their smartphones, laptops, and connected TVs. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Statistics show that millennials like to watch YouTube over traditional TV. As YouTube has billions of users logged-in every month, running YouTube campaigns can help marketers in promoting their brands within a short time span.  

Video offers an easy way to assimilate and share information

Video offers an easier format to understand information in comparison to text. It is more attention-drawing, and unlike text, it does not require reading and understanding words.

People love to share videos more in comparison to written content with family members and friends, and online video platforms and social media websites facilitate video sharing. Mammoth number of videos are shared regularly on various video and social media platforms. YouTube allows embedding videos on websites, emailing them, and also let users share videos on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others. Video sharing by users enables a video ad agency to target a vast audience.

Video is multi-device friendly

Video offers a highly adaptable format, allowing people to watch on their laptops, smartphones or connected TVs. More and more people now watch videos on their smartphones. As people have a short span of attention, video ads that are up to 30 seconds in length, help marketers to attract and engage consumers. Smartphones are best for showing these within 30 seconds ads.

Video quickly conveys a lot of information

Video allows marketers to convey a lot of information in a short span of time. For example, an ice cream cake company can show its full ice cream cake making process in a thirty seconds video ad, enticing viewers to grab their piece of ice cream cake immediately after watching this mouth-watering ad. This cannot be accomplished with ads made up of texts and images. Video serves as a very effective means for storytelling and enables brands to connect with consumers even at an emotional level.

Video increases the chances of converting viewers into customers

In comparison to image and text-based ads, video ads tend to be much more tempting and engaging. An eye-catching video ad with a strong call to action help marketers in attracting more consumers towards the products or services they are promoting and increases the chances of converting them into customers. By using contextual video advertising, marketers can greatly improve the conversion rate.

It is quite clear from the above discussion that why video advertising is a powerful tool for brands to increase brand awareness, inform consumers about their products and services, build consumer trust, and increase sales.  

 

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Beyond Black and White: The True Color of Brand Safety

Beyond Black and White: The True Color of Brand Safety

  23:02    Silver Push

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Over the past few years, a lot of brand safety issues have surfaced that have led marketers to review their brand safety measures. The current coronavirus crisis has intensified the brand safety woes of marketers, as most of the brands don't want ad adjacency to the content dealing with morbidity and mortality. 

Common brand safety methods used by marketers include blacklisting and whitelisting. Blacklisting involves avoiding placement of ads against content containing one or more blocked keywords. In case of video content, a blocked keyword is searched in topic, title, description and metadata.

Keyword-based blacklisting method is in reality not that effective as it seems to be. It is marred by under- and over-blocking of content. Research shows that because of the use of keyword blacklists, more than half of the safe stories published on the major news platforms are being incorrectly tagged as brand unsafe.

Keyword-based blacklisting method can lead to blocking of completely innocuous content. This is because it fails to comprehend the nuances in context, i.e. it is unable to understand the true context in which a keyword is used. For example, if "alcohol" is the blocked keyword, then the blacklisting method will not only tag a video featuring drunk and driving as unsafe, but will also tag a video featuring a recipe in which alcohol has been used as one of the ingredients, as unsafe.

Another problem with blacklisting is that universal blacklists cannot be created. They have to be regularly updated and modified according to the brands' requirements, current happenings and events, latest news, countries, languages and culture. There is also a requirement to tweak blacklists regularly on the basis of current safe content consumption patterns of consumers, so that increased reach for the advertising campaigns can be achieved. Overall, keyword-based blacklisting method is quite cumbersome to implement as it needs a lot of fine-tuning. With this method, content under- and over-blocking is a common problem, and this hinders marketers in getting optimal results from their advertising campaigns.

A whitelist enlists content that has been labeled as safe for ads to be placed against it. A whitelist provides a safe and trusted environment to brands to advertise within. Curating a whitelist for advertising on a video platform, for example for YouTube advertising, involves tagging unsafe content at the keyword, topic, video and channel levels. Video-level tagging helps brands to filter out unsafe videos from an otherwise safe channel; brands do not have to blacklist the entire channel just because of one or few unsafe videos.

Again, like keyword blacklists, whitelists need to be regularly updated, otherwise the campaigns will not witness an increase in reach, and brands will miss newer safe and engaging content for their ads; ads will keep displaying against the same video content enlisted in the static whitelist. 

Creation of whitelists is not an easy process; it requires a lot of curation by marketers, and is time-consuming and expensive. As the whitelisting method limits the number of videos against which ads can be placed, marketers are unable to take the full advantage of the true potential of huge video hosting platforms like YouTube. The campaign's reach gets reduced and the right audience does not get fully targeted.

The above-mentioned brand safety methods provide only suboptimal brand safety and have significant limitations. A highly effective way of ensuring brand suitability and safety is provided by contextual brand safety method that makes use of AI and computer vision. AI-powered brand safety platforms that deploy computer vision technology, provide high degree of context relevance unmatched by keyword-based methods.

Computer vision can accurately detect contexts in videos such as faces, objects, logos, on-screen text, emotions, scenes and activities. Thus, it can effectively detect unsafe or harmful contexts in videos without the risk of under- and over-blocking of content.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, computer vision-powered brand safety platforms enable brands to selectively block ads against mortality-related coronavirus content, while allowing ad placement against positive coronavirus content. Thus, brands can safely capitalize on the news content; this is not possible with keyword-blacklists that fail to understand the true context in which the keyword "coronavirus" is being used.

By using AI-based contextual brand safety method, marketers can not only effectively block ad placement against recognized unsafe categories, but can also custom define unsuitable contexts that are unique to a brand. This helps them provide a fully suitable environment to brands for advertising.         

Computer vision enables marketers to go beyond blacklists and whitelists in order to achieve brand safety in its true color.    

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  05:50    Silver Push

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Contextual Targeting Boosts Ad Relevance, User Engagement and Campaign Performance

Contextual targeting offers a smart and powerful way to advertisers for promoting brands and their products, while to publishers, it offers an effective way for monetizing their content. In the era of online privacy regulations and cookie-less advertising, industry experts predict it to become the mainstream advertising approach.     

Contextual targeting involves placement of those ads that are in line with the context of the content the user is engaging with. Whether an ad is placed against a video or textual content, if it is in context to what a user is watching or reading, he/she finds it relevant, less annoying, and more appealing to see it or click it.

Traditionally, contextual advertising is practiced by placing ads on the basis of keywords and topics. But this approach has its own shortcomings, for example, keywords cannot fully reflect the users’ current state of mind. Keyword-based contextual advertising often results in sub-optimal campaigns.

Using artificial intelligence for contextual targeting offers far better results in comparison to conventional keyword-based ad targeting. This is because AI advertising does not follow the keyword-based approach, but rather uses machine learning and computer vision to identify contexts in content, and then serve the ads that are contextually relevant. Thus, contextual targeting using artificial intelligence advertising technology boosts the relevance factor in ad targeting.

Video is becoming the most sought-after content on the internet. For marketers, video advertising is becoming one of the most effective ways to reach consumers. Computer vision powered in-video contextual advertising has emerged as the most effective and safe way to promote brands and their products by leveraging the popularity and reach of online video content

Computer vision powered in-video contextualadvertising works by identifying contexts in videos such as faces, emotions, objects, logos, scenes and activities. Relevant ads are served that are in line with the detected contexts, thus making the ads more engaging to the users of online video platforms such as YouTube.

Research has shown significantly positive impact of the contextual video advertising on the performance of ad campaigns in comparison to displaying ads irrespective of the context of the video content being watched.

Contextual in-video advertising offers significant benefits over non-contextual video advertising including the following -

·       When contextually relevant in-video ad is served, the ad receives higher attention from users in comparison to random ads. The chances of user interaction with the ad increases.  

          Contextual advertising enhances a brand’s outreach, awareness and perception. A brand’s image improves in terms of quality, value for money, and appeal. Users find the brand to be more reliable and authentic. 

·       By displaying contextually relevant in-video ads, which are more engaging and less annoying than random ads, the perception of the websites or online video platforms that host videos also improves in the minds of users.    

·       Brands are able to convert more people into customers, sales increase, and return on investment (ROI) gets boosted.      

Contextual advertising dramatically increases user engagement and reach for brands by serving consumers ads that are relevant to the content they are engaging with. Overall, contextual targeting is beneficial for all - brands, agencies, publishers, and consumers.   

   

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AI to Bridge the gap between TV and Digital Devices in Real Time

AI to Bridge the gap between TV and Digital Devices in Real Time

  00:22    Silver Push

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The scenarios have changed! Today when someone watches television, he or she is also glued to their smartphones that are constantly in their hands. Thus, creating some serious challenges for the marketers, who despite spending too much cost on TV ads are not being able to reach their potential customers in real time.  Capturing the viewers' attention when it shifts from one screen to another in real time is the prime target for advertisers and marketers. This is where SilverPush steps in. Founded in 2012, SilverPush helps brands reach their target audience in real time by real-time TV tracking and synchronization from Tv to digital through contextual marketing.

Contextual Video Ads

SilverPush intends to expand in Southeast Asia to help the brands operating there, facing the problem of reaching their multi-screening clients effectively with digital contextual advertising on multiple screening platforms. Kartik Mehta, CRO of SilverPush, said in one of his interviews that Southeast Asia has become SilverPush’s topmost priority as it has become one of the top leagues of the world with one of the world’s highest internet and mobile penetration rates. A report released by ‘We are Social and Hootsuite, the internet penetration rate of Southeast Asia was 58% as compared to the world average of 55%.

SilverPush has expanded from India to 12 different countries when it first entered this market in 2017 and began operations in Thailand. Some very big brand names like Unilever, Nestle, KFC, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Ford, and also, some regional brands have been associated as clients with SilverPush. For a very long time TV has been the dominant platform for the advertisers to reach out to their customers. But, now the gap between smartphones and the TV has been narrowed, making it a challenge for the advertisers to reach their potential clients in real time. The ‘TV Sync’ technology was pioneered by SilverPush in India, three years ago. SilverPush has also patented video fingerprinting and content recognition technology. SilverPush’s real aim is to further develop real time solutions and help brands create contextual video ads and normal ads, to raise audience engagement.

Digital Contextual Advertising

According to SilverPush, the real challenge for the brands today is where to put their resources like money, time and people. The immense amount of money spent on TV ads today, doesn’t seem as effective as it used to a few years back. Zenith, a multinational media specialist has predicted that according to them mobile advertising will overtake TV by 2021, with the current growth rate of 21% every year, and since smartphones have become the first point of online access for millions of users, this prediction could possibly be true. Whenever a commercial comes up on television, the viewers quickly shift their eyeballs from the TV to their mobile phones. This is where SilverPush uses the data along with the AI and connects the advertisement seen by the consumers on the TV to an engagement option on the viewers’ mobile phones at the right time, in the form of an interactive advertisement or a content that the viewers can share on social media. This is the ‘Moment Marketing Strategy’.

To provide insights about this technology, Mr. Mehta explained that AI detects ‘triggers’ on TV like when a team scores a goal, AI driven video context detection, will select pre-prepared social media messages with client representations like logos, etc to help the brands be there when the viewers interact with the triggers. 

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