Unruly Media have launched a new report entitled “What’s next for Social Video?“. The report looks at ‘device proliferation, social platforms, video culture and memes; discussing what and where people will be watching, how they will be sharing – and what it will all mean for brands.’ In terms of what people will be watching, the results are unsurprising – the big-hitters will be the 2012 Olympics and the US Election, which Unruly say will be ‘meme playgrounds’. Another media event and advertiser opportunity will be the hype and fun around the end of the world prophecies in the run up to December 21st, which will be the end of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.
Cross Platform Advertising Improves Performance
Unruly also say more brands will push money into video advertising in 2012 following Nielsen’s report in 2011 which demonstrated how advertising across different platforms drastically increases brand recall, message recall and likeability. If you’re in the business of selling video advertising, the data below should probably feature somewhere in your pitch as it strongly suggests that anyone who’s buying TV should also be buying video.
Figure 1 – Nielsen Cross Platform Behaviour, September 2011
How People Will Share in 2012
Unruly also take a look at how people will be sharing video across the different social media platforms. It says Facebook is ‘already becoming a gatekeeper, having already created an Advertiser Whitelist, Facebook Credits and HTTPS support requirements in 2011, and they will continue to control third party access, introducing more third party requirements in 2012 and beyond.’
On Twitter, the report mentions how 2012 is likely to do more with ‘Big Data’ in 2012 to introduce advertising in real-time, now that they have an even larger pool of data at their fingertips since they started wrapping all links with their ‘t.co’ format in order to capture the popularity of particular links.
YouTube is set to continue to blur the lines between TV and online, with connected TVs opening up new opportunities and more experiments with pay-per-view broadcasting along the same lines as their experiments with screening UFC fights.
Somewhat controversially, or perhaps it’s simply to be expected in a report that was created in-house at a social video company, the final section of the report says ‘the honeymoon for the 15-second pre-roll ad is coming to an end as advertisers demand better execution and cut-through and move budgets from push formats to pull-solutions; even pre-roll is starting to morph into an interactive multi-choice medium’.
