Whether you're running a video campaign inside or outside the banner, The Fifth Network's director of marketing has tips for you.

The most difficult hurdle to success with online video advertising is the shift in thinking that must occur in understanding the true benefits of an interactive medium. At its core, Advertising is a profession of bringing people with needs (known or unknown) together with the producers of solutions, and for a long time, this has been done predominantly by sending messages down a one-way communications pipeline.

This single direction communication made the purpose of billboard, radio and television advertising to garner a response from the audience. Success in these media comes out of a combination of the creative, the frequency and the amount of time the audience spends with the ad. Both data and common sense from the last 60+ years support that these media are effective and valuable to advertisers. The relatively slow march of ad dollars away from TV shows that advertisers are comfortable with these media and their metrics.

In the online world, exposure time, frequency and sometimes the creative itself have taken a back seat to "cool," "engaging" and (in the early 90s) "totally rad" interactive features. The ability to instantly measure the direct response to a campaign made it appealing to pitch as the main benefit, and unfortunately, the understanding of online campaign success formed around click and interaction rates rather than the valuable (albeit, more difficult to measure) metrics like awareness, perceived relevance, brand favorability or purchase intent.

In an interactive medium, especially one that supports video, clicks and rollovers can’t be the end game indicators of a successful campaign. Whereas in a one way medium, successful campaigns illicit a response, in an interactive medium, successful campaigns are those that start and continue a dialogue that builds a relationship between brand and users. This is where new thinking needs to be applied.

Think inside the banner
Video rich media is an amazing tool. It transformed the internet equivalent of the billboard (the banner ad) into a fully immersive environment wherein an advertiser can deliver their entire website right to a user.

Be that as it may, recent research by DoubleClick indicates that two-thirds of online users who see an ad and are moved by it to further investigate the brand, do so without ever clicking or interacting with the ad unit. By today’s success standards, these users are discounted and ignored. Hey, if they don’t interact, they weren’t affected, right? WRONG!

As video rich media still proves to garner the most attention on a page, exposure time is hugely important, and video ads that offer information that users find interesting have a lot of value…even when no clicks occur.

One example might be Universal Music and Special Ops who, in promoting the release of the new The Police box set, offered full-length music videos within the ad unit. The ads featured Sting, Sting's old nose and whoever the other Police were, and even though the box set doesn’t include video, the ad unit's inclusion of them was enough to get my attention and make me aware of the new release.

Other uses for video could be an airline ad that offered five-day weather forecasts for the zip code of any of the destinations being promoted, or a fast food chain that offered video tips on how to integrate an order of large fries into your diet, guilt-free (or perhaps a 20 minute video of classic jazzercise).

Thinking outside the banner
The problem with ads is that inherently, they are ads. Users approach them as such and take the promises of each message with a grain of salt and skepticism. New video technologies that live outside the banner, however, such as advertiser-sponsored video players, can be integrated into a publisher’s site.

The age-old battle between content people and advertising people certainly flares on this integrating sponsored content, but what we've seen with this approach is that if an advertiser's video is truly engaging content, then that video serves to both enhance the publisher's offering as well as gain beneficial exposure for the marketer.

Obviously any video an advertiser offers as content can't be obnoxiously promotional, but if the video is helpful to the user, we've worked with many sites that are willing to allow videos much longer than the standard 15- or 30- seconds allotted for ad messaging. To this point, remember that brand exposure time, which according to Atlas DMT averages around 19-21 seconds, can now be stretched to however long the content stays engaging to users. This could be several minutes or hours or days…but not weeks.

Automobile advertisers could offer video to users on car enthusiast sites about how to do donuts, what to do after a fender-bender (always get the other guy’s insurance info), or the nuances between changing a tire in the summer vs. the winter.

The makers of a razor could offer video to men's or women's health sites showing how to avoid razor burn, when you know it’s time to get a new razor, or the best types of cloth to blot blood with.

A telecommunications company could reach users on tech sites and walk them through the process of getting the pictures they take with their not-quite-an-iPhone-mobile devices onto their desktops.

These types of videos help brands become lifestyle brands that reflect the attitudes and values of their audience

Conclusion
Opportunities to reach out to users with video abound, and massive amounts of data can be gathered on these engagements. By looking at how long people watch certain videos and what videos are most popular with which audiences, companies can bolster and optimize their messaging and offerings.

Internet video advertising is attention grabbing, and it carries the potential for a glut of interactions, but a paradox is born when you consider that, in the medium best known for instant measurement, the true benefit is in how the technology can be used to slowly grow and nurture lasting, lucrative relationships.

Bradley Werner is the director of marketing for The Fifth Network. Read full bio.