Gokul Rajaram, Project Manager Director at Google
Gokul Rajaram, Project Manager Director at Google, says that online video ads can drive search and vice versa.
Transcript: Gokul Rajaram, Project Manager Director at Google
Online video has added an element of richness and interactivity that wasn't present before online advertising. It's that sight, sound, and motion and it's basically married the immersive nature of TV advertising with accountability and measurability that existed in online advertising as a whole, so it's really brought the best of both worlds together.
How do you best measure engagement? There's this buzzword being tossed around. On one side, how do you plan video campaigns? How do you think about where to place ads? In television you have these specific events like the Super Bowl where you know you're going to reach large audiences, and you have specific channels where you can reach targeted audiences. Online offers both. It can offer placement where you can reach large number of people, a large number of users, and it can offer very targeted placements. Marketers are still trying to figure out all the things they can do: they can buy directly from a portal, they can go through ad networks, they can go to specific sites. And so there is not a common vocabulary in terms of planning online video campaigns. And on the other side there is not a common vocabulary in terms of measuring effectiveness. Different publishers, different people that have online video streams that give you different metrics, and different ad servers will give you different metrics. And so both the planning and measuring side, there is not a common standard that has emerged. And to be honest that is what's holding back a little bit the evolution of online video ads.
Even a year ago, most of the creators that were running online videos were just repurposing TV commercials that are 30 second spots. What is happening today is that a creative agency is shooting specifically for online at the same time shooting for the TV spot. And so they're looking at what online is all about; interactivity, being compelling, funny, and engaging and then creating it specifically for an online audience. We're definitely seeing a shift. It's not there as much as we would like on the publishing side, but it is going there faster compared to a year ago.
We've worked with a number of advertisers to figure out, after they run a campaign, did they use us to watch the campaign or are they using Google and other search engines more? We saw that, yes, people who are exposed to online video campaigns ended up searching for those brand keywords more often on search engines than people who were not exposed to the campaign. This actually suggests a very interesting synergy between search and online video and overall display advertising where if you run one, you will actually see a benefit on the other side. It's a great synergistic virtual cycle between the two.
The economic trends follow the quality of content in some of this, and at this point over the last couple of years, individual users have been able to create content that is compelling, sustainable, and episodic, and have generated large audiences for the content. We are selecting users that have those characteristics: compelling, original, fresh content, who have large audiences who tune in, essentially, to watch their content, and really wanting them to revenue sharing on ads. Those kinds of things where you are getting new content creators to join the existence and creating new content is going to be really be compelling for online video advertising.