Great video advertising demands more than brands just putting television commercials online. Tony Martin, SVP of ROO Media, explains what is needed to deliver top results with your video campaigns.

In a world that is increasingly obsessed with video content, consumers are becoming ever more adept at satisfying their video cravings online. But ironically, advertisers have not been so quick to embrace this opportunity.

According to research house Jupiter, regular video use in Europe grew by a staggering 80 per cent between September 2006 and April 2007. These figures are impressive by any standard, and so are the opportunities, but the market's true potential is still to be seen. One crucial element of online video is yet to be realised… how to make money out of it! It's clear that the market and its economics are changing shape; but ironically, online video advertising, far from being the panacea for those wishing to monetise their video assets, is actually proving to be a business inhibitor.

The market has matured, the users have matured and the diversity of online video content has exploded. What hasn't matured is the advertising itself. One minute, 30 second or even 15 second pre-roll ads are not the way to go, especially when laid alongside the bite-size pieces of content so oft consumed by internet grazers.

The innovation that drives both content and internet technologies in general has been conspicuous by its absence in the advertising that should be supporting and growing the associated business opportunities. Static, web-based advertising has moved on in leaps and bounds, but few seem to have realised that just because it's 'video on the internet,' doesn't necessarily mean you should just bolt-on a primetime ad from terrestrial television as a pre-roll. YouTube is at least trying to change this. The new advertising formats that are now rolling out across its network go some way towards addressing these issues, but we as an industry need to wake up before we lose anymore ground.

To make this leap we first need to consider our objectives. Online advertising, in its simplest form, needs to deliver three core components:

• high value CPM (with ongoing brand presence)
• high impact commercial messaging (in less than five seconds)
• a low impact on user experience and their access to the requested content.

Online video advertising is very capable of achieving these objectives, as MillwardBrown's research attested to earlier this year. It found that as more TV networks are putting their programming online, video advertising within those programs leads to higher brand recall. Participants had 82 per cent brand recall with online viewing compared with 54 per cent on TV. Furthermore, the percentage of those who correctly linked an advert to a brand was also higher: 93 per cent online compared with 70 per cent on TV, proving that the theory of commercial messaging and brand presence works, but the execution has been less than satisfactory.

So why is the leap to online video advertising proving so difficult? The creativity is to a certain extent in the marketplace already, but the missing component is currently with the media sales houses. What should be a cutting-edge industry is lagging behind when it comes to lateral thought on advertising formats and the creative sell. Established formats are what they sell best, but deviate from the 'norm' and they begin to struggle.

At the moment there is little agreement in the industry as to what the dominant online video ad unit should be, and the choices we have are driven by the necessity to develop some type of monetisation quickly -- no matter how crude or annoying for the viewer. The truth is we don't have to be confined by traditional advertising; we can create new ad formats and technologies designed specifically for online video. We can't continue to be short-sighted by blaming a lack of inventory, and instead we need to embrace the issue and admit our problems come down to a lack of creativity in the final piece of the puzzle: monetisation.

We must keep the pressure up to transform the market and subsequently stimulate further growth. Advertising that finally 'works' will see a step shift in market growth and take online video into the media mainstream, where its users already firmly believe it belongs.

Tony Martin is senior vice president of ROO Europe.