Video advertising is a big business in Australia, accounting for 60 per cent of display ad revenue, reaching 85 per cent of viewers every week. This $3.3bn market is still growing fast, which means that there can be competition for viewer attention and clutter if advertisers don’t use the right strategy. At a unique event at Sydney’s Surly’s American Tavern, Kargo welcomed advertisers to learn more about what it takes to create winning video campaigns in today’s crowded landscape.
Rob Leach Kargo’s GM for APAC, shared the latest CTV and video advertising research with Mercury Analytics and Metrixlab, unpacking how brands can optimise their video strategy and explore the evolving landscape of tactics, technologies, and data, including the impact of formats and environments and the future of CTV advertising.
The research looked at two key areas: pre-roll online advertising and CTV advertising on FAST, AVOD and BVOD. In online pre-roll on mobile and desktop, Kargo commissioned Mercury Analytics to research the pre-roll advertising, and they compared a standard pre-roll with a Kargo-enhanced branded canvas pre-roll ad. The research found that:
- The environment remains important—online video advertising works better in premium curated content and websites than in UGC or’ long tail sites.’
- All pre-roll works, but enhanced formats, e.g. Kargo’s branded Canvas, work much harder for the advertiser than standard pre-roll.
In key brand metrics that marketers care about, Kargo’s enhanced formats outperformed standard pre-roll on every measure. The research found a:
- 16% lift in brand awareness
- 29% increase in brand favourability
- 36% in purchase intent for enhanced v standard.
And consumers were more positive about these enhanced formats in every measure as well, finding them:
- 39% more relevant
- 21% more credible
- 13% more memorable & more likable.
Mercury Analytics found that these brand metrics and user reaction results led to consumers saying that they were far more disposed to take meaningful actions as a result of seeing enhanced pre-roll ads over standard preroll:
- 32% more likely to click on the ad –
- 30% more likely to search for the product online –
- 35% more likely to buy the product.
CTV viewing is growing fast
Between 2019 and 2023, the average daily CTV viewership in the U.S. doubled from 58 to 115 minutes, according to GlobalWebIndex. It is the new ad-funded services, not the SVOD platforms, that are driving the growth in CTV viewing. In the last 3 years, CTV households had a 20% increase in viewing ad-supported services, while SVOD saw only a 7% uptick during the same timeframe. The fastest-growing area of ad-supported viewing is FAST channels and Australia sits in the top 5 countries in the world for ad revenue on FAST channels.
In CTV advertising the suggestion that has been pedaled in Australia that BVOD is the best content/environment for advertising is a myth. FAST, AVOD and BVOD are all equal when considering TV content, rather than short clips and UGC, and all perform better than linear TV. In AVOD, BVOD, and FAST delivery, it is all content that was broadcast at some point, so technically, it is all BVOD! The important elements of CTV advertising that make it work harder than linear TV are that it is TV content the viewer is choosing to watch, delivered over the internet, so affording better targeting, and displayed on the biggest screen in the house. It doesn’t matter if it is FAST, BVOD, or AVOD.
Metrix Labs compared standard preroll with a Kargo-enhanced format, the Branded Canvas, on CTV using attitudinal responses from surveys, expression analysis via facial coding, and attention evaluation from eye tracking.
The results demonstrated that the incremental brand imagery from enhanced ads lifts overall attention; this, in turn, elicits the strongest and most favourable emotional responses; and so, overall, enhanced ads deliver substantial lifts in all key brand metrics:
- 24% lift in brand favourability for enhanced v standard pre-roll
- 18% increase in product consideration for enhanced v standard pre-roll
- 25% increase in purchase intent for enhanced v standard pre-roll
“Enhanced pre-roll formats drive results and ROAS in both online and CTV, when compared to standard pre-roll. Enhanced formats fill both hearts and carts and should be used whenever feasible.” Previous research from Kargo and MediaScience demonstrates how adding online to TV/CTV makes a video campaign more efficient by reducing the CPM and increasing the reach. At the same time, seeing the same video on multiple screens was proven to make the ad more effective by increasing awareness and recall compared to TV alone. “That is why Kargo’s enhanced ad formats have been designed to be replicable across CTV and online”, Leach added, “Brands spend a lot of money creating great video ads. Why not make them work harder by adding a Kargo-enhanced format, at no charge, and distributing the ad across all screens – mobile, desktop, and CTV? We call this Kargo CORE – create once, run everywhere,” said Leach.
