The SmartVideo Blog

I recently joined SundaySky as Head of Customer Success, to support our customers with the strategic delivery of their performance-focused SmartVideo programs. I was excited to join the team at a time when SmartVideo is disrupting the video and customer lifecycle space. The team is motivated and super smart, plus I get to work with the most recognized brands who are totally invested in building the most engaging and impactful customer engagement experiences.

A burgeoning ecosystem of buyers, publishers, ad networks and technology companies congregated at ad:tech in San Francisco last week to participate in what amounts to nothing short of the complete transformation of the advertising industry. 

We’ve seen tremendous growth in online video ad consumption over the last couple of years. Online video advertising revenues topped $1 billion in the first two quarters of 2012, video ad views reached 9.9 billion in February, and YouTube just hit 1 billion monthly users.

Welcome to Election Day. Here is a roundup of how online videos and video ad campaigns played a crucial and record-breaking role during the 2012 presidential elections.

Retargeted advertising is not a new concept of performance advertising. And when you add online video, you meet the intersection of performance and brand advertising. Retargeted video advertising bridges these two ad disciplines and delivers the best of both worlds, proving to ‘outperform’ brand advertising and ‘outbrand’ performance advertising.

Similar to television advertising, the most effective lengths for online video ads are 15 and 30-second spots. Yet the advantage SmartVideo advertising has over TV is that pre-roll ads are targeted to customers based on their individual behavior, value or other personal relevance. But which video ad length is most successful at converting site abandoners in to your loyal customers?

Bringing site abandoners back to the site is an ideal way to drive brand engagement and recapture an otherwise lost investment in traffic, thereby increasing sales. An effective way of doing this is with retargeted ads. These ads re-engage visitors who left the website without converting based on their previous Internet actions.

Video advertising is still behind display advertising when it comes to relevance. The display ad space has taken full advantage of visitor tracking capabilities to retarget ads to visitors based on their past behavior on a brand’s website.

Today, when consumers shop online, they expect the personalized attention of an in-store experience. They want brands to provide engaging experiences during purchases, and at every stage of the customer journey. As a result, innovative marketers are turning to online video as an engagement tool.