Measuring online video: GRP is the way to go

Agency Corner

Measuring online video: GRP is the way to go
Lisa Marino, RockYou Vice President of Sales

Recently, AdAge reported Mindshare’s move toward measuring online video under a Gross Ratings Points system. As someone who leads our social video campaign efforts at RockYou, I find myself fighting to create the notion of 3 screen convergence a reality. Mindshare has taken a giant step in that direction.

The “no brainer” benefits

· Compare apples to apples, or at least apples to pears. While there remain many TBD elements, we collectively owe brand clients comparable and consistent video measurement across all media. A Gross Ratings Points system would deliver meaningful and objective measurements statistics where currently little confirmation of value exists outside of impressions and generated views, as defined by the online video provider. Making online video marketing a meaningful and objective format will only accelerate its wider acceptance among advertisers.

· In a down economy advertisers stick with proven media channels. In the current ad economy, we’ve witnessed budgets evaporate. In many cases advertisers end up choosing proven media partners-- television is certainly one of those channels. The online video world would do itself a favor by more aggressively positioning itself as a measurable complement to the proven TV media outlet, and a GRP system would immediately address that.

· Online video consumption is growing….rapidly. According to ComScore’s recent report on video consumption, online video has gone mainstream. Check the stats if you’re not a believer.

146M people, or 77% of U.S. Internet audience, viewed online videos, up 34% from last year
The average online viewer watched 273 minutes of video, up 40% from last year
Users view an average of 87 videos per month, 18 more videos per month than last year

Given the huge growth and sheer time spent by consumers watching online video, an accurate measurement system such as GRP would make acceptance even broader.

The less obvious benefits

· Performance is proven and measurable. While we have all read stats touting the enhanced performance of online video, here’s some specific data from our experience at RockYou. Whether it has been our video campaigns promoting, General Motors, Axe or Hannah Montana, the difference between video engagement vs. display ads is staggering. User initiated videos received a play rate between 2%-12% vs. a CTR on a top performing banner campaign of .5%. Further, when these videos were on RockYou’s Super Wall app on Facebook (with over 18M unique visitors a month), the forward rate of these videos to friends were between 2x and 4x the video view count. We see anywhere from 2-7% of users receiving the forwarded video watching the sent clip. Now that social media can layer on age, gender, behavioral and other targeting techniques, this performance gets even more compelling because an advertiser can display video to their exact target audience.

· Anyone Can Play. Many brands want to engage with online video but don’t know how. The advent of production companies focused on digital programming, such as Katalyst, Howcast, XLNTAds and many others, especially short form, have made great, viral video available to brands lacking their own video assets. Additionally, there are content companies specializing in almost any genre from sports to comedy to green to how-to videos. Finally, video ad units, especially in social media, are now much more controlled and safe environments for brands, because advertisers can completely avoid placement next to UGC. Social applications are completely controlled by their developers and in many cases have no user-generated content within their pages.

· Just because you build it does not mean they will come – no Field of Dreams here. Would a brand make a TV commercial and NOT make a corresponding TV buy to promote it? Why would online video advertising be different? RockYou spends material resources on our own video assets and network, allowing us to help advertisers drive from 5M up to 10M video views per day. With the sheer amount of online video on the web, without promotion behind an online video strategy, brand assets can enter a black hole.

The knock-out punch – how online and mobile change the TV dynamic

· Interactive Video. Online and mobile finally give advertisers an opportunity to migrate from shouting a one way message to their target consumers to engaging in two way communication. Interactive video gives the consumer the very valuable element of choice. Now your target audience can select how they would like to engage your brand. And share it.

· Video View Guarantees. Unlike TV, online and mobile are the two media channels where brands can demand performance – and they should. Every online publisher can guarantee video views. We haven’t won video business in 2009 without it.

Kudos to MindShare for putting a stake in the ground at the agency level. As a major social media publisher, RockYou is committed to helping develop and supporting an iGRP system. I’d suggest every online video publisher/distributor do the same.

Lisa Marino is Vice President of Sales at RockYou. Email comments at lisa@rockyou.com or follow her on Twitter @rockyouads