For a long time I’ve been calling for standards in social media advertising.
Today if an advertiser wants to make a social media buy across multiple
social sites, they will need to build different creative for each of
the different social media advertising products on each of the major
companies, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Rockyou, Slide etc.
Until recently, online video has faced the same problem. But in May, the IAB approved new online video advertising standards.
Two studies have shown a positive impact from the establishment of the standards. Reports Wired:
Riddled with inconsistencies, video advertising has been
a difficult marketplace to tap into. Advertisers are often forced to
tailor creative for each video ad purchase, which is a big turnoff to
advertisers looking to make big buys. Meanwhile, long, poorly formatted
ads lead to a high rate of attrition by alienating viewers.In May, the Interactive Advertising Bureau implemented standards to
help streamline video advertising. Today, Break Media, an entertainment
community for men, and Panache, a video advertising delivery-platform,
released a study showing high rates of success with video ads since the
standards went into effect.Over an 11-week period, the study tested the success of the four
standard formats for in-stream video advertising established by the
Interactive Advertising Bureau: pre-roll, interactive pre-roll,
non-overlay ads and overlay ads. Tracking advertisements for three
large corporations — Honda, T-Mobile, and truTV — the study found that
viewers had a high tolerance for pre-roll and overlay ads.All of the four formats had extremely high click through rates.
Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87 percent, and 77
percent viewed videos with overlay ads for at least 15 seconds.“Getting major advertisers major advertisers to move and turn into
video advertising is going to take time,” says Panache CEO Steve
Robinson. But he is enthusiastic about the new standards: “now you can
just do the creative and know that it works.”
NewTeeVee notes another positive study:
Meanwhile, in a study of 100 campaigns and nearly 65
million impressions, Tremor Media measured 80 percent completion rates
for both 15- and 30-second pre-roll ads. While the study’s size makes
it more significant, Tremor did not look at click-through rates. Tremor
said it actually saw slightly higher completion rates for 30-second ads
than 15-second ones, attributing viewer willingness to watch longer ads
to their placement next to high-quality content.
For Social Media to be a business we’ll need to see similar standards for social media advertising. This is why I think AOL buying Bebo is good for the industry.
With AOL joining Fox as major media companies with a “dog in the
fight”, hopefully we’ll move more quickly towards standards for social
media advertising.
For more from Jeremy Liew, go to his blog.
