Shifting Ad Budgets to Digital Video

#QOTD: What do you think of the 3-question episode vs. the 5-question? Let me know!

General statements like “you should move your budget to digital video” scare me. Typically when people think about online video they think about spending 5/10% on the overall production and then 90/95% on the distribution. Of that 95% of allocated budget, they just end up pounding the users with right hooks and wind up pissing them off.

So what does online video mean to most people? It’s the pre-rolls on YouTube where people end up tabbing out and don’t end up consuming the content. OR, they’re going to sites like ESPN.com and getting pounded by 30 second videos that waste OUR time, which I’m sure pisses most of us off. 

What I’m most worried about when I hear about these allocations is that I actually like live TV commercials better than the online videos that end up blocking the users from what they actually want to do or see. As I’ve stressed a million times before, this comes down to providing VALUE. 

So when I hear these notions versus what I know the practitioners are actually doing, it bothers me because I know that they’re spending their budgeted dollars on video that is annoying customers. They end up putting these videos in places where the consumer doesn’t want it, versus putting a larger percentage of the money on making better quality content and putting it in places where people actually want to consume it — such as in native Facebook dark posts, where the user has the option to view or not.

In theory, it’s great that traditional dollars are moving to digital but unfortunately people continue to misplay it because they’re not focusing on providing actual VALUE.