Dive Brief:

Face­book rep­re­sents 46% of all video ads cre­at­ed, and that share jumps to 74% when includ­ing video ads on its pho­to-shar­ing app Insta­gram, accord­ing to research from Clinch made avail­able to Mar­ket­ing Dive. Those fig­ures mean that Face­book tops Google’s YouTube for video ad cam­paigns, which rep­re­sent 41% of the market.
The study also showed that, despite healthy growth in dig­i­tal video ads, qual­i­ty and plat­form fit remain an issue. About 75% of mar­keters sim­ply adapt their TV com­mer­cials for dig­i­tal video efforts, with 44% report­ing that they don’t short­en com­mer­cials for each plat­for­m’s sug­gest­ed length. For exam­ple, TV spots typ­i­cal­ly run 15 to 30 sec­onds, but Face­book and YouTube rec­om­mend six-sec­ond videos.
Half of the respon­dents said they see strong results when per­son­al­iz­ing their video cam­paigns. About 90% of mar­keters with cus­tomized Face­book or YouTube video ads report­ed see­ing ben­e­fits, and 70% of those say they have seen improve­ments in KPIs.

Dive Insight:

Face­book beat­ing YouTube for video ads might point to mar­keters’ lin­ger­ing con­cerns over Google’s abil­i­ty to guar­an­tee ad place­ment on brand-safe chan­nels. Face­book has also been ramp­ing up its video efforts on News Feed and new­er plat­forms like Watch to draw con­tent cre­ators and adver­tis­ers away from YouTube as the plat­form strug­gles with dimin­ished trust fol­low­ing sev­er­al instances where ads appeared next to unsa­vory content.
It’s a weak­ness Face­book is more fre­quent­ly tak­ing advan­tage of, as reports sur­faced ear­li­er this week detail­ing a pro­gram the social media giant is test­ing that offers mar­keters the chance to pur­chase ads on videos that it deems to be brand-safe. Adver­tis­ers can par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gram for $750,000 for three months but have lit­tle con­trol over where ads will appear, which has made some leery of the ini­tia­tive. Google, for its part, is try­ing to ease mar­keters’ con­cerns with tougher ad eli­gi­bil­i­ty require­ments for con­tent cre­ators and stricter vet­ting cri­te­ria for the videos that can include ads.
As 78% of mar­keters plan to increase their pro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal video ads in 2018, accord­ing to Clinch, this com­pe­ti­tion will like­ly inten­si­fy. The group’s research also high­lights that mar­keters too often take a one-size-fits-all approach with their video cam­paigns. Only half report per­son­al­iz­ing them, and near­ly half say they don’t tai­lor the con­tent to the plat­form. This could put brands at a dis­ad­van­tage, as adapt­ing cre­ative to the audi­ence and plat­form yields the best ROI.

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