If you are interested in new technologies and entrepreneurship, you probably already know about Mark Suster and his blog.
In one of his latest posts, “The Future of Advertising Will Be Integrated”, he explains how the nature of online advertising is changing, and what this means for the advertising industry, for businesses and for internet users.
It is fascinating to observe how consumers’ behavior towards advertising evolves, and how the whole industry adapts to these profound yet quick changes. For example, Mark provides us with the following chart, from an eye-tracking research conducted by Jakob Nielsen, which shows where our attention is focused on a typical web page:
The bottom line: it is now almost impossible to reach consumers with boring ads. People won’t care about you if you interrupt them. But if you enhance their online experience, and if you create content that is worth talking about, then the opportunity is huge, especially in the context of social media.
In order to reach consumers efficiently, marketers are consequently working on giving internet users exactly what they want: ads that are fun and useful. Ads that drive engagement and that present a genuine interest to them.
An industry segment that is particularly relevant and dynamic in meeting these new challenges is video advertising. Many video advertisers have in fact adopted the strategy to create highly entertaining and engaging video content. Content that is worth talking about, and that has an intrinsic value. This is a new kind of advertising, adapted to the social media age, where the key is to create content users care about, so it generates engagement and creates viral spread.
But this is not an easy thing to do, to say the least. Experience shows that to reach its viral potential and achieve its strategy, a promotional video must not only be entertaining and relevant: the seeding phase of the campaign is critical to its success. This phase represents the foundations on which the success of any viral campaign is built.
That’s precisely what we focus on at Wingsplay: we make videos reach their full viral potential, by connecting influential social media users with viral video advertisers.
Influential social media users discover the latest viral video ads before anyone else. When they view a video they particularly like, they share it on social networks and blogs, and make money each time the video is being viewed. That way, their friends, fans and followers get the chance to discover the funniest ads of the moment.
On their part, advertisers seed their viral videos through the social media users who generate the most engagement on social media.
By directly leveraging the social media users who generate the most viral actions, advertisers optimize the seeding phase of their viral campaigns, thus giving their content:
– more virality (because the video is shared by influencers, who generate high levels of engagement and viral actions),
– more visibility (because the video appears directly in the user’s stream or is integrated to the blog’s content section, bypassing the “banner blindness” condition ), and
– more impact (because the video is shared by influencers who have built strong ties to their audience) compared to traditional video advertising networks.
That’s a win-win-win situation, which represents a new kind of advertising network, adapted to the social media age.
The world is changing, people are more and more connected and some internet users have gained significant influence online. The opportunity is huge for advertisers who understand how to communicate in the social media age, how to create experiences that are remarkable, that improve the social media experience, and how to make them known.
