This marks the next step for Lowe’s network, which launched a year ago.

Dig Deeper: Why we care about retail media networks

Off-site media. To power Lowe’s network, as well as media networks for other brands and retailers, Yahoo has created Yahoo Member Connect. 

This makes it possible to run personalized omnichannel campaigns delivered to retail customers (like Lowe’s customers, for instance) through off-site channels like digital out-of-home (DOOH). They can also run on other third-party digital inventory outside of Lowe’s owned properties using the Yahoo Exchange.

Measurement and attribution. The Yahoo partnership gives the Lowe’s media network in-depth campaign measurement and sales attribution – and not just for owned digital and in-store Lowe’s sites. Because ads are being served to Lowe’s customers on these off-site properties, advertisers will be able to connect the dots from impressions to purchases at Lowe’s.

Brand engagement. Brands already advertising with Lowe’s media network include faucet maker Delta, GE Appliances, a Haier company and Electrolux.

“As content consumption and digital purchase behavior evolves, we’re always working to engage our consumers, command attention, drive relevance and increase overall sales,” said Rachel Bennet, omnichannel retail marketing director for Delta, in a statement. “Working with Yahoo and Lowe’s One Roof Media Network gives us access to a comprehensive set of tools that takes our campaigns and audience engagement further, including premium digital out-of-home, display and video.”

Why we care. Retail media networks aren’t just happening at retailers. There are other big brands with valuable customer bases that are launching ad networks. For instance, Yahoo has also teamed up with Marriott to deliver ad experiences.

The partnership of Lowe’s One Roof Media Network and Yahoo is notable because it extends the reach that advertisers have with retail customers. It’s already attractive to brand advertisers to be able to reach a customer through an in-store ad, or on the retailer’s website, when the customer is close to the point-of-purchase. But the next step is reaching those customers through off-site, third-party channels, wherever they are. That’s where the real value in retailers’ first-party data can be found.

Dig deeper: CTV added to Kroger’s retail media

The post Lowe’s and Yahoo team up for retail media partnership appeared first on MarTech.

Today, Walmart opened new immersive experiences on metaverse platform Roblox. This is an effort to engage the next generation of media consumers, as well as, hopefully, Walmart shoppers.

Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play are open to the global Roblox community of over 52 million daily users, with a focus on consumers ages 17 to 24. Walmart’s virtual hubs on the site will invite users to explore, play virtual games, listen to music and see other entertainment, as well as collect virtual merchandise, known as “verch.”

Why we care. Retailers like Macy’s and Old Navy have gotten their feet wet in the metaverse, reaching a subset of their broad audience who likes to delve in virtual promotions and NFTs. A recent study suggested that consumers are attracted to metaverse experiences addressing key interests like music and travel, and they’re less interested in products when they go virtual.

Walmart has built these sites with this in mind. They align with many of the younger consumers’ key interests and will enhance their Walmart experience.

Dig Deeper: How brands are joining the metaverse with virtual experiences

From livestreaming to Roblox virtual experiences. Over the last year and a half, Walmart has accelerated its livestreaming strategy, which includes shoppable video livestreams on platforms like TikTok. Even though watching a livestream video doesn’t require a VR headset or a virtual avatar, it’s a virtual experience in that many people are engaged remotely at once. This got the company thinking about a metaverse-like platform like Roblox and its fast growing 17-24 age audience.

“It’s about meeting customers where they are online,” said Justin Breton, brand experiences and strategic partnerships director for Walmart, in an interview with MarTech. “We wanted to show up in a virtual sense in a way that is authentic to the audience that’s there on Roblox. Our conversations with Roblox were insightful and we aligned a perfect storm of discovery.”

Top-funnel for now. The Immersive games and other experiences are aimed at discovery of the Walmart brand and their products at the top of the marketing funnel. Over time, as users engage more, there will be more opportunities for consumers to make transactions, with both virtual and real-life merchandise, according to Breton, who also says Walmart is early in their strategic process regarding the metaverse.

“This is an opportunity to show up where consumers 17 to 24 actively are and represent our brand and get them to think about Walmart differently,” said Breton.

To drive users to the Walmart hubs, the retailer is using paid and earned media, both in-game and on platforms besides Roblox.

Walmart Land. Because this platform is a massive virtual landscape, Walmart is using the metaphor of “isles” to mark off their specific regions of the game. Internally, Walmart is also referring to these “isles” as potential “aisles” in a virtual shopping experience.

Roblox users can now visit Walmart Land and play 3D games via their avatars. There are currently three experiences built off of Walmart Land, each with their own spinoff activities.

For instance, on Electric Island, avatars can traverse an interactive piano walkway, engage in a dance challenge and play a cross-promotional trivia game hosted by Netflix.

In October, Walmart Land will host a motion-capture concert on Electric Island, dubbed “Electric Fest.” There, users will see performances by YUNGBLUD, Madison Beer and Kane Brown.

House of Style includes an oversized cosmetics obstacle course and a roller-skating rink, as well as a virtual dressing room. It features brand tie-ins for fashion and beauty labels aligned with the audience demo, such as af94, UOMA by Sharon C, ITK by Brooklyn & Bailey, Lottie London, Bubble and others.

Walmart’s Universe of Play. Linked to Roblox’s Universe of Play, Walmart’s version will feature interactive games and toys, just as the holiday season picks up.

Here, users can earn virtual coins and other virtual goods, aka “verch.” Key brand tie-ins for Walmart’s Universe of Play include Jurassic World, Paw Patrol and Razor Scooters.

“Verch is very much a part of our strategy,” said Breton. “At launch all verch will be available through meaningful discovery, for instance by going to the top of Electric Island and playing the dance-off challenge. The game mechanics unlock tokens for virtual goods. From there, we’re looking at ways to expand verch to benefit the business.”

Users can interact in these virtual experiences using a laptop or desktop, their iPhone or Android phone, an Xbox console, or the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive VR headsets.

The post Walmart launches Roblox metaverse experiences appeared first on MarTech.

The update to Taboola News gives recommendations for reliable news sources via publishing partners, as well as working directly with device manufacturers like Samsung.

Dig deeper: TikTok is setting the ground rules for social media

What it does. Taboola News can now be installed on mobile device wallpapers by manufacturers, while also serving news recommendations to users directly on the mobile lockscreen. Recommendations from trusted publishers can also be delivered through browser notifications refreshed throughout the day. The product is now available in 80 markets globally.

The need for news. Journalism ratings service Newsguard found that last year eight of nine people under 18 were exposed to misinformation about COVID-19 in the first 35 minutes of a TikTok session. This year, 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation are viewed by TikTok users before the content is taken down, according to TikTok’s own findings.

Why we care. Platforms like TikTok are designed to grow their audience and keep them watching videos, which cuts into time spent consuming other content like news. So, news publishers need ways to get to more readers. And, oddly enough, the existence of fake news on TikTok and social media shows that those platforms’ users do have some desire to be informed. 

By pumping news recommendations into the mobile device lockscreen, there’s a better chance that some of the accurate news will get to the users first.

The post New Taboola feature fights fake news on social media appeared first on MarTech.

Favorability. Participants in the study gave a favorable rating 59% of the time when exposed to a native video ad. That number dropped to 50% on social platforms and 51% in a video platform environment.

Awareness. 33% of participants displayed top-of-mind awareness about a brand when shown a native video ad. This displayed a marked improvement over the control group, which only had 14% top-of-mind awareness.

When native video was combined with social video ads, the awareness climbed to 49%.

Impact of native ads. Taboola, which sells content discovery and native advertising products, sponsored the study.

“With industry estimates indicating that video advertising in the U.S. will reach nearly $50B this year, brands have a lot of opportunities to influence customers, as long as they’re choosing the right platforms and mix of platforms to relay their messages,” said Taboola CEO and founder Adam Singolda, in a company release.

Dig deeper: Taboola acquires Connexity

Why we care. Social media is where consumers receive word-of-mouth recommendations from family and friends. Still a potent source of brand impact for marketers. But social is also a highly contentious space for politics and other turnoffs. It’s not the ace in the hole it once was, and should be complemented with other native environments in a digital video campaign.

The post Native video tops social media in brand awareness study appeared first on MarTech.

About 38.5% of Hootsuite’s customers have planted a flag on TikTok, with the rest (around 63%) planning to launch TikTock content sometime this year, according to an internal Hootsuite study.

What it does. Hootsuite brand customers will be able to schedule and publish TikTok content within the Hootsuite platform. This will allow marketers to manage TikTok alongside efforts on all other social media platforms in one place.

Dig deeper: Ultimate guide to social media marketing

Marketers will also be able to moderate and engage with comments in real-time. They will also gain post-performance and user engagement insights informing future campaigns.

Educational resources. Additionally, Hootsuite is rolling out TikTok-related resources for marketers. They include:

• A culture guide that highlights key TikTok trends, including sound, aesthetics, types of videos and slang;
• A blog content series that promotes best practices on growing business and building customer relationships on TikTok;
• Workshops and webinars to walk through video content development with social media marketers and
• A newsletter that provides tips and highlights successful video efforts on TikTok.

Why we care. TikTok isn’t only about reach. It’s also a place for authentic organic discovery and not just paid exposure for advertisers. With this added layer of realness comes a certain amount of risk for brands as they venture into uncharted territory. This Hootsuite partnership and rollout adds some needed structure and predictability to a brand’s debut on this rapidly growing social destination.

The post Hootsuite joins TikTok’s Marketing Partner Program appeared first on MarTech.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll dive into each piece and give you practical, actionable ways to use them at your company.

The collaborative planning workshop

To begin with, we’ll start at the top with the Collaborative Planning Workshop. The Collaborative Planning Workshop brings alignment to what the team is trying to achieve and empowers marketers to focus on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs. This session should happen quarterly or at the start of any large campaign or initiative.

Where most agile frameworks begin with the backlog of work for the team, we found it very important to start at a higher level and ensure alignment is happening between the agile marketing team and the key stakeholders asking for work from the team. 

One of the biggest challenges we’re addressing with the Collaborative Planning Workshop is the disconnect between the stakeholders who ask for work and the team on the hook for delivery. Way too often, the people setting the marketing strategy and the designers, copywriters, social media specialists and others don’t have a seat at the adult table. Work comes to them in the form of the creative brief via an electronic system, but there’s no conversation. They aren’t being treated like marketers but rather as producers of output. 

The Collaborative Planning Workshop is just what it says—a collaborative conversation where everyone is on an equal playing field and striving towards successful outcomes.

The Guidepoint

This framework begins with everyone understanding the actual business reasons for success and alignment on a Guidepoint. Here’s how we define the Guidepoint in the Agile Marketing Navigator:

“The Guidepoint helps the team and stakeholders navigate what success looks like for an upcoming campaign or project. Stakeholders come to the workshop with a business goal for the organization. During the workshop, the group comes up with a short written description, called a Guidepoint, of what success looks like for this marketing initiative and how it aligns to the organization’s goals.”

The Guidepoint is the connective tissue that rolls upward and downward in the organization. It’s often the forgotten middle layer between what the stakeholder is on the hook for and the tactics executed by the marketing team to achieve success.

The Guidepoint aligns the agile marketing team and stakeholders on a shared purpose and creates a focus on the team’s outcomes. It also helps with prioritization, so work that’s not aligned gets a lower priority or isn’t done at all.

Dig deeper: Freeing agile marketing from its software development roots

Here are a few example scenarios to get you started:

Industry: Healthcare

Business Goal: Acquire an additional 5,000 new patients during the first year after the grand opening of our new hospital.

Guidepoint: Create a campaign targeting elective surgery candidates that generates 1,500 leads that ultimately generate a higher than average conversion rate than the industry average.

Industry: Retail

Business Goal: Increase cart checkout dollar amounts by 10 percent over last year.

Guidepoint: Launch a campaign targeting suggestive add-on purchases, moving the average cart checkout price to $50.

Industry: Financial Services

Business Goal: Generate a 25% increase in our personal finance app downloads in 2022.

Guidepoint: Generate an average of 50 new downloads apps with an activation rate of 25%.

Ideally, you have an agile marketing team formed with a straight line to a stakeholder and business goals that need to be achieved, which makes it pretty easy to focus on a single Guidepoint at a time. 

However, many marketing teams haven’t streamlined this way and must support multiple lines of business at once. In those cases, we suggest no more than three Guidepoints at once for the team, or they’ll quickly lose focus. If this becomes problematic, the marketing owner on the team will need to work with key leaders to determine the most important business goals for the organization and prioritize them accordingly. Some teams have had great success determining percentages of time each stakeholder gets based on the business value of their line of business.

We can only succeed for a clear, focused outlook on what success looks like for the marketing team and the organization as a whole.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholder

The post Aligning on a Guidepoint: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator appeared first on MarTech.

As you evaluate your martech stack, you might realize that you need to do more than use the right technology — you need to optimize it. Optimization science is harnessing the full potential of customer-facing technology. It’s both a methodology and a mindset — and it’s about squeezing every ounce of value from your new solution. 

To optimize your technology solution’s impact, you need to think beyond features and functionality. Specifically, you need to think about how you want to leverage your new platform to influence customer associations, perceptions, and behaviors to align with your strategy. In other words, you need to take a holistic approach to technology deployment — and that encompasses your customer’s brain. 

Getting started with a few simple steps

The martech landscape is dotted with a cornucopia of solutions. According to Scott Brinker, VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, there are 9,932 martech solutions on the market — a 24% increase from 2020. With a seemingly overwhelming number of options from which to select, where do you even start? Also, how do you navigate the waters of social psychology within your organization while setting the stage for triggering behaviors among the potential customers who interact with your technology? 

To get started, let’s take a look at the following three steps:

• Selecting the right technology platform.
• Understanding integration constraints.
• Configuring for optimization. 

1. Selecting the right technology platform 

Yes, the first step might seem a little elementary; but such is the nature of initial steps. How many times did legacy thinking affect decisions at your place of work? How many times did existing relationships or power dynamics influence an important decision? Behavioral norms and social psychology often play an outsized role in technology deployment. As you evaluate your options, forget about the relationships and biases of your co-workers (and expunge your own biases to the extent that’s possible) — and select the technology that can deliver optimal results. 

Selecting the right technology involves foresight and a laser-like focus on your audience. After all, you’re deploying a system that allows your organization to interact with your customers to achieve tangible benefits. As you attempt to assess your technology options objectively, now is the time to start considering your customer’s brain.

2. Understanding integration constraints 

There are more questions to ask before you embark on your journey. Perhaps most obviously, how does the platform fit within your current martech stack? Do you see a sea of messy code over the horizon, or do you see a fluid integration in which data flows easily from one system to the next? 

Although you don’t want to be completely beholden to legacy systems, you do need to consider how your new marketing technology integrates with current, and quite possibly, future systems. Failure to look closely at integration at the beginning could end with an Odyssean voyage home, leaving you alone to fend off Scylla and Charybdis as you navigate the seas of cognitive dissonance. 

3. Configuring for optimization 

A good marketer will create a messaging strategy that focuses on benefits instead of features. Still, you need to harness the full set of features to reap the greatest number of benefits from your marketing technology. As a result, you likely need to configure your new platform to utilize various features. To get the most out of your technology solution, start thinking about the solution’s full capabilities early in the process. 

Imagine a scenario where your initial goal was to capture leads via chat online. You’re happy because you implemented a conversational chat platform that accomplishes the initial task perfectly. It even connects to your CRM and your analytics dashboard. Tragically, however, you didn’t dedicate anyone on your team to create automated conversation flows before your go-live date to qualify leads after-hours. That would be a colossal failure — no matter how good the technology. 

How does the brain respond to your technology?

You’ve selected the technology solution that works best for your organization. But how does it interact with your customer’s brain? The human brain processes an enormous amount of information—most of which occurs below the level of consciousness. When your customer looks at your system, for example, the eyes dart rapidly across the user interface, triggering a cascade of neurobiological activity that can affect everything from thoughts and emotions to desired behaviors such as downloading white papers and liking your social media posts. 

As your customer’s brain re-constructs the visual world in front of your technology, you have an incredible opportunity to shape the associations linked to your brand. And you can do this while influencing the behaviors you find most valuable to your organization. As such, you need to think beyond the framework of traditional deployments and start thinking about how to facilitate behaviors that align with your goals. 

Activating aesthetic appreciation in the brain 

Is the user interface aesthetically pleasing? Yes, it’s an odd question for a technology deployment; but your customer’s brain does odd things. If you’re looking to optimize your new system’s effectiveness, you need to think about how you create an aesthetic experience for your customer. This is important because the brain responds favorably to aesthetic experiences, as you can read here. 

According to Anjan Chatterjee, MD, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Oshin Vartanian, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, aesthetic appreciation emerges from an interplay among different systems in the brain, which encompass “sensory-motor, emotion-valuation and knowledge-meaning” areas. 

Known as the aesthetic triad, the involvement of large-scale systems underscores the magnitude of an aesthetic experience. And what’s most important for you to know is that your technology interface can trigger an aesthetic experience. 

Considering that an aesthetically pleasant experience can activate brain parts associated with perceptions, emotions and behaviors, you need to think about the user interface in terms of aesthetic appreciation. As such, let’s take a look at aesthetic considerations for a couple of marketing solutions, including: 

• Conversational chat technology.

• Email marketing software. 

Conversational chat technology 

Your new chat platform is everything you imagined. But is it everything your customer imagined? You already did the hard work, configuring the system to capture leads online when you’re offline (unlike the scenario discussed earlier). You even created thoughtful conversation workflows that underscore how well you get the nuances of automation and conversational chat. But how does the customer’s brain process the visual appearance of the chat window? 

Sure, it matches your brand colors. But does it create an aesthetic experience for your customer? What does your bot avatar look like? How do the shadows and lines affect subconscious associations? If you want to optimize the deployment of your chat platform, you need to think about every little visual cue that your customer’s brain might process — and then optimize accordingly. 

Email marketing software 

You feel confident that you selected the right email marketing platform. You’ve integrated it seamlessly with your tech stack and configured it to achieve your goals. You’re particularly pleased about how you can connect with your audience with robust automation sequences. But what does the email look like to the user? 

When deploying a new email marketing platform, ensure that you’re creating a truly aesthetic experience. Often, this involves using a visually appealing template or creating a custom design that connects your audience to your brand. Whether you need to outsource design work to an agency or leverage your in-house team, you need to go above and beyond to ensure your email looks good. 

Triggering dopamine spikes 

The brain likes aesthetically pleasing stimuli, but that’s only part of optimizing your solution. When it comes to influencing action, you need behavioral prompts spread strategically across all of your marketing channels — and that starts with dopamine. 

Dopamine facilitates goal-directed behavior. As I described in my previous article, the largest dopaminergic spikes occur during moments of anticipation of a reward. With this in mind, let’s take a moment to consider a scenario in which your consideration of the customer’s brain early in the process helped you make the right technology selection and configuration. 

Video hosting solution

You plan on launching a series of videos. The good news is that you already know what type of content your audience likes. You also know the behavior you want to trigger. You want each person to provide an email address to watch a video. But did you know that different platforms allow you to gate your content differently?

How do you use optimization science to ensure you capture as many emails as possible? If you’re looking to optimize your conversion rate, you need to trigger a dopamine spike right before asking for an email. How do you do that? You need to provide content that creates anticipation. 

Since you want to create anticipation before asking for an email address, you want to avoid gating the video before the user starts watching it (which is the traditional approach). Instead, select a solution that allows you to gate the content right before the moment the user is at the most elevated state of anticipation during the video. If you do this, you can elevate the amount of dopamine in each customer’s brain to exchange email addresses for content at a higher rate than you ever thought possible — while also playing on the concept of loss aversion, which you can read in one of my previous articles. 

Conclusion 

The above scenarios only represent a few considerations about which to think. After all, you can facilitate a variety of complex behaviors in your customer’s brain that extend far beyond what’s mentioned in this article. The key takeaway is to think about marketing technology adoption in terms of optimal effectiveness. As a marketing leader, you can launch your metrics into the stratosphere when you approach technology adoption with the customer’s mind. And that starts with an understanding of optimization science.

The post Optimization science: Technology and brain science can drive performance appeared first on MarTech.

Customers are more responsive to video content than text, regardless of which channel it lives on. This can be credited to the fact that video content uses images, sound, and text to create an immersive experience.This can pose a new content creation challenge for marketers, though, and has led to the need for new tactics and technologies that focus on creating and executing video ad campaigns. 

However, comparing and analyzing video ad performance across platforms isn’t as easy as it may seem. The growing popularity of video ads has prompted many social media platforms to modify and expand their video ad options and metrics, so bidding, view counting, and reporting can vary significantly from platform to platform.

For instance, viewing a video for three seconds or more is considered a view on Facebook and Instagram. In contrast, watching a video ad for 11-30 seconds is considered a view on YouTube Trueview ads. Many platforms also follow the Media Rating Council (MRC) standard or variations of it (more on this below).

To accurately analyze and leverage video ad results, advertisers need to understand the way each platform counts and charges for video ad views since they aren’t all the same. That’s why we’ve created this guide to provide an overview of how video ads work across various platforms and how marketers can use video ads to their advantage. We will cover:

• What are video ads?
• What counts as a video view on each platform?
• Additional video metrics to consider.
• How video ad measurement helps marketers succeed.
• Learn more about video advertising.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

What are video ads?

A video ad is generally a short, informative video that aims to help promote a product or service. These ads can be anywhere from a few seconds to over a couple of minutes long. They are expected to be a concise representation of what the product and brand stand for and what they offer to the customers. 

Video ads generally appear before, during, or after the non-commercial video content is played on video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. However, they can also be a short standalone video that aims to push a product/service in an innovative way. 

How do video ad views work?

Platforms have different policies about how they display and treat their video ads. While some might consider a few seconds of viewing time as a view, others require users to watch the ad for a longer duration for it to count as a view. Engagement metrics also depend on what kind of ad is being shown to the user. An ad that plays before a video is usually treated differently from ads produced and published as standalone videos. This then affects the videos’ engagement metrics and how they will be promoted on the platform.

What counts as a video view on each platform?

The Media Rating Council (MRC) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) define a video ad as viewable when at least 50% of an ad is in view for a minimum of one second (for display ads) or two seconds (for video ads). While some social media companies and platforms have adopted this standard, many have defined their own view measurement systems.

Here’s a look at how some of the biggest companies define video views:

Google and YouTube

The skippable TrueView ads running on YouTube and the Google Display Network consider a video as viewed in either of the following scenarios:

• Someone engages with the ad by clicking on it or a CTA link.
• Someone watches at least 30 seconds of the video ad if it is longer than 30 seconds.
• Someone watches for the entire ad duration if it is shorter than 30 seconds.

Unique metrics to keep in mind 

YouTube focuses on simple engagement metrics like watch time, audience retention, and demographics. This means that for YouTube video ads, you need to tailor content that:

• Keeps the audience engaged throughout the video.
• Keeps the audience coming back to your account for more content.
• Is being watched by people of the age, race, gender, and geographical demographic that it was made to target.

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and its subsidiaries, including Instagram, count a video as viewed for both in-stream and Stories video ads after three seconds of watching. However, you can choose to pay for video ads on either a cost per thousand (CPM) basis or a ThruPlay basis. 

When buying on a CPM basis, an impression is counted when one pixel of the video ad comes into view. On the other hand, with ThruPlay, it’s counted as a view when the video is played to 97% completion or for 15 seconds, whichever comes first.

Unique metrics to keep in mind 

Facebook and its subsidiaries give special attention to two engagement metrics: Reach and Engagement. Reach is the number of users/accounts that see your ad. These can be organic views from friends and followers, views from the video being shared by people to their followers, or by the platform’s algorithm suggesting it to viewers. Engagement is how many people like, share, and comment on your ad post. Facebook and Instagram ad strategies are largely tailored around optimizing both these metrics.

LinkedIn

For LinkedIn’s sponsored content, videos are counted as viewed when 50% of the ad is in view and plays for two or more consecutive seconds- on both desktop and mobile.

Unique metrics to keep in mind

Apart from the standard view count (50%), LinkedIn also counts views at 25%, views at 75%, and views at 97-100%. As the names suggest, these metrics count the number of viewers watching the ad till a specific point. LinkedIn also focuses on its full-screen views, which is the total number of clicks to view a video in full-screen mode.

TikTok 

On TikTok, it’s counted as a view as soon your video starts to play. If the video is on autoplay or loops, or a user rewatches the video multiple times, all of that is counted as new views too. However, watching your own video is not considered a view.

Unique metrics to keep in mind

TikTok counts your net views over the course of seven or 28 days. The counter is refreshed after every interval, but the initial watches count towards views and help the ad get more engagement so that they can be shown to a larger audience. TikTok also keeps track of how many followers your account gained within the last seven or 28 days and how many profile views it attracted.  

Some other video-sharing platforms with their own unique engagement metrics include the following.

Pinterest 

Pinterest uses the MRC standard definition of views, so it measures the total number of times someone watches your video with at least 50% of the video in view for two or more consecutive seconds.

The video ads on Pinterest are used to generate brand awareness and conversions campaign objectives.

Reddit 

Reddit also follows the MRC standard and considers a video viewed after the video is played for at least two seconds at 50% viewability. However, a full video view is counted after the video plays for three consecutive seconds at 100% viewability. You can pay on a cost-per-view (CPV) or cost per thousand (CPM) basis.

Snapchat 

Snapchat’s video ads play full-screen, typically with the sound on. It counts views after at least two consecutive seconds of viewing or a swipe-up action on the ad. Some ads also qualify as viewed after two seconds of consecutive watch time without the swipe-up action.

Twitter

Twitter has also adopted the MRC standard and considers a video ad viewed when 50% of the video is viewed for two seconds or more. It is also considered a view when the viewer engages with the video by expanding or unmuting it. In contrast, a 3s/100% view is when your video is played for at least three seconds in 100% view and a six-second view is when your video is played for at least six seconds in 50% view.

Ever wonder how frequently marketing software is replaced?
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Download the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey!

Additional video metrics to consider

Many platforms offer more engagement metrics and view-counting mechanisms. For example, Google also tracks quartile watch time metrics and other key performance metrics such as click performance, engagement performance, and reach and frequency.

Facebook, too, offers quartile watch time metrics, showing how often users watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of a video ad. It also used to report two-second, three-second, 10-second, and ThruPlay views for all bidding options; however, in 2019, the social media giant revealed that ThruPlay would be the default buying option for video ad campaigns and view optimization. As a result, advertisers had to manually switch their 10-second video ad campaigns to ThruPlay to keep their campaigns up and running.

Reddit reports views at 25%, 50%, 75%, 95%, and 100% of video length, as well as the number of times your video is started and played for at least three seconds, five seconds, and 10 seconds. It also shows the percentage of users who watched your video and clicked.

YouTube counts engaged-view conversions for in-stream ads whenever a user clicks on the video ad or watches 10 seconds or more of the skippable ad. The number of clicks your video receives can help you understand how your ad appeals to its viewers. YouTube also offers quartile reporting, showing how often a video is played to 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.

How video ad measurement helps marketers succeed

Video ads are an excellent way to create immersive ad campaigns that work better with modern audiences. These ads help your company get its message across concisely while also establishing a familiar brand image that resonates with users. Marketers can leverage video sharing platform metrics to create content that is designed to reach a large number of viewers within days of the initial launch. This allows them to use social media algorithms for generating high revenue and excellent leads for their company. 

Additionally, studies have found that video messages make people happier than pure text, which can help break the overall negative mood of business inboxes. Marketers can use video ads to help their campaigns find a diverse, genuinely organic audience that is much more likely to engage with the ad and create loyal customers for the brand.

Learn more about video advertising 

Video is an engaging tool for marketing and creating brand awareness. It leads across the board as the most popular and effective format with the highest ROI.

Here are some helpful video marketing resources to help you learn more about the best solutions for your brand:

• Data shows marketers investing more in video in 2022: Learn how and why over half of the marketers are upping their video budget by 5% or more.
• Doubling video ad revenue with AdOps: MarTech’s daily brief unpacking helpful insights, news, and tips on how marketers can drive video ad RoI with AdOps.
• How Jagran New Media doubled video ad revenue with a managed AdOps service: India’s leading publishing house used a managed video ad operations service to take control of their video ad inventory.
• 10 top retail sector video ads of 2021: Get inspired by some of the most popular video ads of 2021, measured by total views.

The post Why we care about video advertising appeared first on MarTech.

What it does. Casted Insights is intended to provide a holistic view of video and audio audiences. It will:

• Identify brands are engaging with audio and video content and provide IP address-resolved firmographic data.
• Note whether the brands are already in the funnel.
• Surface company-level contact information.
• Track performance of videos, podcasts and themes.
• Provide data to feed attribution models and marketing automation and ABM strategies.

Why we care. Did we mention that B2B is looking more and more like B2C. It may be in part generational, but there’s little doubt that B2B buyers are bringing content preferences from their everyday lives into the B2B buying process. That means a preference for visuals over words, for video over white papers, for podcasts over sales calls.

B2B research is increasingly self-serve and brands are finding ways to make the right types of content available. But collecting “watches” and “listens” is not as valuable as knowing your content is being consumed by contacts at an in-market target account.

The post Casted adds firmographic data to its B2B video and podcast platform appeared first on MarTech.

This comes even as there are more choices than ever. The number of unique program titles increased 20%, from 646,000 to 817,000, between December 2019 and February of this year. 

Breaking it down. Americans are certainly doing their best to keep up with that. Their average weekly time streaming video increased by 18% YOY, to 4 hours, 49 minutes. A little over half of that time (53%) went to streaming video on demand. Multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) like Comcast, DirecTV, DISH, Cox, etc., were used 25% of the time. Virtual MVPDs – Hulu, Sling TV, YouTube TV, etc. – came in at 10%.

In February of this year, content from streaming platforms accounted for just under 29% of consumers’ total time with TV, ahead of broadcast programming (26.4%) for the fourth straight month. In total, Americans watched nearly 15 million years’ worth of streaming video content last year.

The number of Americans now paying for four streaming services increased to 18% vs. 7% in 2019. Nearly two-thirds of viewers (64%) say they wished there was a bundled streaming service that would let them choose the channels they want.

Why we care. While viewing time has increased, there is only so much further it can grow. Given that it is possible that some SVOD providers will fall by the way side. It is also possible they will find a large enough niche audience to support them. Either outcome is good for marketers. Fewer platforms and titles would mean more viewers for those that remain. Successful niche operations offer more targeted marketing opportunities.

Dig deeper: Is Nielsen’s prime time over? Purchase renews questions about products and long-term value

The post Streaming chaos: Increasing number of services makes it harder for viewers to find the content they want appeared first on MarTech.