This year’s IAB Australia Video Video Ad-Vantage Event hosted by IAB Australia’s Video Council Members was a box office hit.
We certainly had it all; the anticipation, the excitement, the emotions and a very happy ending. Almost feels like IAB Australia events are like the latest Avengers franchise; they just keep getting bigger and better every year.
As always the most crucial element for the success of this year’s IAB Video Ad-Vantage Event was that we at the IAB Video Council built the event around all the feedback we collected from the past events. The format was punchy, full of rich insights including video case studies, and both panels were carefully picked to represent the diversity of our industry, with both publishers and marketers in the hot seat.
Sam Walters , Head of Creative Development at Kantar, started the event with an incredibly engaging presentation covering the important topic of ‘Creative Cut Through’. This session set the tone for the remaining sessions to come. The presentation included some great video case studies from various verticals showcasing storytelling and the need to dial up emotions to create meaningfulconnections with consumers.
Next up we had the IAB Video Council panel which examined media mix modelling for our day and age. Now, media mix or agnostic media planning is not something new to the industry but at times it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Instead we find ourselves focusing on individual publishers and formats to deliver the desired outcomes.
Let’s be honest, we humans are not that easily convinced. For example, I’m not going to walk into a store and buy a brand new $4000 70 inch LCD TV because I saw a square advert displayed once on my mobile phone right? We all need to be exposed to different mediums at different time to push us from the top end of prospecting to consideration and finally down to the purchase funnel.
The IAB Video Council panel also talked about how the ‘One Size Fits All’ theory doesn’t work. As I said on the day and I echo it again, ‘One Size Fits All’ didn’t work for the fashion industry and we can all bet it will not work for digital advertising in 2019. We need a fit for purpose creative strategy to drive intent in an audience that is more fragmented than ever before.
At Unruly we have done some incredible work in the content testing space over the past 12 years.Recently we conducted a major research piece with marketing effectiveness expert Peter Field. Together with his partner Les Binet, Peter came up with the famous 60:40 rule: the ideal ratio of marketing budget that should be spent on brand-building vs. activation to drive growth. They suggest 60% of an advertisers budget should be spent on long term brand building and 40% on short term successes. This goes back to my earlier point, if I don’t know anything about the product or brandat macro level, I’m unlikely to make any attempt to consider or purchase it.
Advertisers need to be very clear about what they want their video content to achieve. The most crucial finding from our research with Peter Field was that the video response metrics linked to campaigns that drove short term success are very different to those that drove long term success. Video content really needs to be designed with one purpose in mind; short term sales activation or long term brand building. Programmatic, RTB, direct IO’s. These are just the pipes. What you put in the front end is what really matters and that is the creative.
If the IAB Video Council were the supporting act of the day then the Marketers Panel was definitely the main event. We were joined by some of the top marketers from our industry. We had Toby Dewar (Head of Media & Agency Management, Westpac), Amy Luitingh (Marketing Manager – J&J Carefree), Rachelle McDermott (Senior Digital Manager – Blackmores) and Sue Zerk (Marketing Director, 20th Century Fox).
As part of the ice breaker Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia, tasked everyone on the panel with presenting a piece of work they were really proud of and explaining why. What was amazing to witness was that all the creatives presented were focussed on long-term brand building rather than on short term sales.
The message is loud and clear. Marketers need metrics to help them understand how campaigns are delivering or contributing to their business goals, rather layers of complex media jargon. We as an industry need to make the complex simple and adopt metrics that actually matter. We need to embrace a diverse video strategy encompassing all consumer touch points including instream, outstream, infeed etc.
Video is no longer the smallest or youngest member of the digital family anymore. It represents 8% of the total advertising market in AU, it has been growing in double digits for the past 3 years and will continue to do so.
Lotte Laws from Twitter brought the event to a close with a great recap, and a reminder that maybe size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to digital video…. Length does.
So that’s all folks. Like any successful Marvel movie, we have already begun working on the sequel. You never know, next year’s IAB Video event might just see Tony Stark delivering a keynote on VAST 4 next time around – so watch this space!
