Meeting equity, user experience, and DEI were top InfoComm 2023 themes. Discover what tech was presented to fulfill each theme in our recap.
The post The three I’s of InfoComm 2023 appeared first on AVI-SPL Digital Enablement Services Provider.
Check out our latest infographic that features 4 top animated video types and their uses.
Video landing pages are the best of both worlds. Landing pages offer streamlined layouts designed to highlight the call to action (CTA), while video offers better engagement and content consumption data. Together, they create a highly efficient conversion experience that you might be tempted to optimize for search.
Indeed, the visibility that search affords your content can be significant. Plus, video SEO has only gotten easier, so not indexing video landing pages can seem like leaving money on the table. But there’s another important use case that can’t be ignored: A/B testing.
Why A/B Testing Is Important
Testing is a key ingredient in effective marketing strategies. It segments the audiences, refines the messages, and maps content to the right channels. The time investment can be substantial, but the payoff is worth it.
Sadly, one of the reasons why proper testing is often neglected is because marketing efforts can generate a lot of data while delivering revenue and leads. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear inexperienced marketers refer to simply running multiple campaigns as testing. If Campaign A outperforms Campaign B, they might say that they tested Campaign B and “it didn’t work.”
However, comparing campaign performance should never be mistaken for testing. Performance data can uncover trends and provide corrective insights, but only testing can reveal the factors driving performance and identify the formulas for repeatable success.
A/B testing, in particular, is a powerful tool for isolating variables and returning controlled results. A/B testing uses two identical pieces of content with a single variable changed—like a headline. That way, if the control (A) loses to the variant (B) in the test, the loss can be attributed to the headline.
Controlling for variables is the goal, but testing is never immune to chance. A single variable should be A/B tested at least three times to confirm the results and the entire process repeated for subsequent variables. This kind of proven data can then be applied to messaging and content to predictably enhance marketing strategies.
Why Landing Pages Are Important for A/B Testing
Marketers who’ve performed tests know that the more data you have, the more accurate your results will be. This is why optimizing a landing page for search can seem like a valid tactic: a bigger audience should mean better test results.
However, the biggest challenge with testing is controlling the audience. No matter what your SEO tool, agency, or consultant tells you, you can never know the breakdown of an organic audience. Between the death of third-party cookies and the prevalence of anonymized browsing, the available data is too spotty to be actionable.
Controlling the audience is precisely what unindexed, unlisted landing pages are designed to do. Coupled with email, a high-intent owned channel, they are the perfect testing sandboxes. With a good marketing automation platform (MAP), you can take a selected cohort and split them into equal, randomized segments.
Why Video Is Important for A/B Testing
Testing headlines and calls to action is relatively straightforward, but if you want to A/B test overall topics and content, you really need video.
Despite what web metrics like time on page or scroll depth suggest, measuring the content consumption of written content is notoriously difficult. Between multiple tabs, pop-up ads, and distractions from the family pet, written content simply has too many variables outside the marketer’s control.
Video content is different from written content for a few reasons:
Video is more engaging. Emails promoting videos generate higher click-through rates. Not only does this represent higher intent, it means more views and more accurate results.
Video is more captivating. With higher intent comes increased attention. Video also tends to have a more captive audience simply due to the sensory stimulation of sound and moving images.
Video is more calculating. Every second of video that’s viewed is a quantifiable measurement of content consumption. Higher intent and attention imbue this number with more accuracy.
To be clear, no content format is completely free of behavioral variables. Viewers can drag a video slider (called “scrubbing”) just as easily as they can scroll a webpage. In fact, the longer the content is, the more likely they are to do so with either format. The difference is this behavior is far less common with video, especially video on landing pages with an engaged email audience.
Tips for A/B Testing with Video Landing Pages
There are lots of best practices related to A/B testing, but when video is involved, there are some unique things you can do.
Select the Best Audience
Creating equal, randomized segments is the easy part—most MAPs can do this automatically. Choosing which cohort of customers to segment can be tricky. Thankfully, marketers have lots of data available, particularly content data.
Customer Data. If your goal is to test interest in two new products, you should start by segmenting your customer list by purchase history. This would include not only purchases of similar products with similar price points, but purchase frequency as well. Customers with a single purchase are less likely to have an interest in new products than customers with multiple purchases.
Marketing Data. Next, you should refine this segment by excluding customers who haven’t clicked through an email within a certain period of time, like the past 90 days. Some people just don’t open marketing emails, so including them dilutes your sample size. Furthermore, they can pollute your test results with outliers who sporadically open emails to rage-click through the content.
Content Data. Finally, your segment should account for your customers’ viewing habits. For example, Brightcove offers Audience Insights: a customer data platform that can segment audiences by watch history and other key inputs. This data is then automatically synced with CRM and MAP tools to trigger emails and other targeted communications. With Audience Insights, you can drill down further and select customers who are particularly engaged by product videos.
Keep in mind that audience segmentation is a delicate process. A highly refined segment is worthless if the sample size is too small; the results won’t be statistically significant. So don’t make your test parameters too specific, and keep your final cohort over 1,000.
Create the Best Experience
Video landing page experiences should be as easy to consume as they are to create. Employing the following features will improve the customer experience and enhance the test results.
Autoplay. This may be the only time in marketing history that an autoplayed video is welcomed by its audience. Unlike the autoplayed video ads and social media videos that can erode engagement with complaints, email users expect videos to autoplay. Your email copy has already made it clear they’re clicking to watch a video, so don’t make them click again.
Low-code templates. Some CMSs are easy to use, and even some MAPs offer landing pages, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be optimized for displaying video. Using a low-code landing page template from an OVP like Brightcove, you can quickly design a slick layout that keeps the video experience responsive and above the fold. The templates are easy to customize, but you can also add custom CSS to more closely match your website’s branding and style.
Interactivity. A video’s engagement rate tells you more about content consumption than written content ever could. Interactive video is a step further. With interactive features like sentiment or polling, you can get an even clearer picture of which video performed better. Just be sure to limit the interactive elements so they’re not overwhelming. With Brightcove Interactivity, you can easily monitor this with the Interaction Rate.
When Not to Optimize Content for Search
As generative AI hype pushes into the search engine world, SEO is becoming more of a meme than a best practice. Certainly, it’s a critical tool of the digital age, but some tactics work better without it. A/B testing is one such tactic that is no less valuable and works best when video landing pages are not optimized for search.
Jennifer Garner thought she was going to be a stage actor and only took her first TV role because she was flat broke. She also slept on a futon in some woman’s kitchen for 9 months while she was waiting (and working her tail off!) to hit her stride. She now has an IMDB page a mile long. You never know what will be your life’s best stepping stone. What you can do is be in position to take advantage of the breaks that come your way.
If you feel like you need a change or you’re looking for a career pivot, read on. Even if your current role isn’t everything you want it to be, it’s time to think differently about where you are now. It could be a stepping stone for where you want to be next.
1. See every role as a chance to sharpen your skills or try on different roles.
Jennifer Garner didn’t expect to become a screen actress, but taking a small TV role led her down the path that landed her in every American’s living room. Whether you’re just starting out and finding your way or you’re well established, but feeling a little stale, stay open minded.
Take each role you accept as a chance to get paid to figure out what you’re interested in and get some experience while you’re at it. As you go, you’ll find your lane. Then you can either keep running in that lane or take those finely-tuned skills to your next full-time job. Highly-skilled, well-rounded workers have a leg up on the competition.
2. Think of every role as a paid audition.
Even if you don’t land your dream job right away, anything that gets your foot in the door could end up being the story you tell of how you got your big break. If you love a business’s culture or brand, be open to a less desirable role and just see where it leads. You get to learn what you like with companies and people you enjoy and then have a built-in connection for future opportunities. If you do well enough on your “audition,” you’ll be in position for more work in the future. From there, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to accept an opportunity or keep working for yourself. The power is in your hands.
3. Make connections.
Once you’ve shown yourself as a reliable, positive teammate, the world opens up. People talk about you and you organically build a robust network that includes both decision makers and people in related fields.
Many factors determine what career path is the right fit for your life. It’s rare you’ll start out in a dream role, but a not-so-great role may be exactly the thing that allows you to live the life you want to live. For others, one role might be the right thing, but only for a season. After a brief walk down one road, you may take all your experience and do a complete u-turn. Whether your current role is a stepping stone to your dream position or the long-term career path you didn’t even know you wanted, the best time to go for it is right now.
The post Waiting For Your Big Break? 3 Ways to be in Position For it. appeared first on PayReel.
Listen as Missy Peare, Recruiting Manager at Maslow Media Group, discusses why pre-vetting candidates is so important and how it enables recruiters to provide quality candidates to their clients — saving them time and money.
Bring workforce management into focus with maslowmedia.com.
The post Is Your Talent Pool Pre-Vetted? appeared first on Maslow Media.
The opportunity to monetize with an AVOD model has never been greater. In 2022 alone, the growth of AVOD viewers was higher than subscription OTT and free premium video streaming combined (Insider Intelligence). Furthermore, traditional pay TV is steadily declining and expected to account for roughly a third of households by 2027.
Yet, anyone who’s spent time in the media industry knows that implementing an AVOD service is easier said than done. In fact, Caretta Research described this process as “fiendishly complicated,” noting that many companies simply ignore this route altogether.
While AVOD can, indeed, be challenging, there’s another option for media companies who want a low-risk entry point: video ad marketplaces.
What Is a Video Ad Marketplace?
In its simplest form, a video ad marketplace is an online advertising platform that allows advertisers to buy video ads and publishers to monetize content.
For advertisers, ad marketplaces provide an efficient way to reach their target audience through placements alongside high quality content. For publishers, they provide a convenient way to sell inventory (in-stream ads within their videos) to advertisers. For both, ad marketplaces serve as an intermediary, using a single platform to manage, optimize, and facilitate programmatic video ads.
Publishers generate revenue through a programmatic advertising system, which eliminates the time-consuming process of finding individual advertisers and includes features like real-time bidding and unified auctions. Most leading ad services now have integrated supply-side platforms (SSPs), giving publishers the opportunity to quickly set up and control their revenue streams. By tracking and analyzing users, web traffic, costs, and reporting metrics like CPM (cost per thousand impressions), publishers can optimize their approach to maximize potential earnings.
There are three key elements to ad monetization solutions.
Ad marketplace. The ad marketplace matches buyer and seller preferences via SSPs and DSPs (demand-side platforms) to deliver meaningful impressions for all parties.
Ad server. The ad server distributes the ads, facilitates the management of the campaigns, and tracks performance. For advertisers, it offers tools and analytics to help manage and optimize the campaign. This includes quantitative data (video views, clicks, and impressions) as well as qualitative data (information about the audiences engaging with the ads). For publishers, it instantaneously determines which ads to serve with which video, and delivers that ad as a seamless part of the experience.
Video player. A high quality player allows publishers to offer a variety of video ad strategies, including floating players, picture-in-picture ads, and header bidding.
What Are the Benefits for Publishers?
One of the key benefits for publishers on video ad marketplaces is the stable and reliable income they can generate. They offer a fixed payment per click, view, or impression whether or not the ad directly contributes to a sale. This can take a lot of the guesswork out of how much the publisher will be paid. For many publishers, it’s simply a matter of creating great content and leveraging the marketplace’s ability to acquire advertisers that want to fill vacant advertising spots with relevant, high-quality ads.
Ad marketplaces can also offset the cost of producing content with the revenue generated from offering advertising opportunities. By opening up these additional streams of revenue, content creators can focus more on creating compelling content and less on finding and negotiating with advertisers.
Finally, ad marketplaces give creators peace of mind knowing they are getting the best possible rate for their ads through the automated bidding system. Advertisers tend to prefer this approach as well. According to eMarketer, more than 82% of digital video ad spending is transacted programmatically in the UK, Canada, U.S., Germany, and France. Ad marketplaces assure them that they’re paying the best available market price while getting a high-quality ad delivered on a premium video player to highly targeted audiences.
How Do You Know If You’re Ready to Monetize Your Content?
Every video ad marketplace has different requirements for publishers, but they primarily involve two aspects of the publishers’ business.
Content Library. Publishers must have an established content library. Advertisers expect their ads to reach the audiences they’re targeting, so having a well-curated library allows marketplaces to serve up ads on the most relevant content.
Monthly Viewership. Publishers must also meet the demand for views and impressions. Beyond relevance, advertisers expect their ads to perform efficiently, reaching as much of the right audience as possible.
What Should You Look for in a Video Ad Marketplace?
Every publisher should also have requirements for video ad marketplaces. Features and options can vary dramatically, but the following examples from Brightcove’s Ad Monetization service illustrate what an industry-leading media platform prioritizes.
Bidding Options
Unsold inventory is a common challenge for media companies, typically due to technical issues, pricing issues, or to avoid the same user seeing the same ad too many times. But as a publisher, your goal is to sell as much of your inventory as possible at the best rate possible. Ad servers do this by bidding out your inventory to advertisers in several different ways.
To maximize revenue, a good ad marketplace should include the following options.
Fallback bidding. This approach allows bids to be made against unsold inventory, with the highest paying bidder winning that impression.
Header or player bidding. This approach allows the player to conduct the auction and pass the winning bid back to your ad server without latency. The highest bidding marketplace will get the inventory, maximizing the revenue potential from your content.
Ad Insertion
Ad insertion is how your ads are inserted into the video stream through your video player. There are two primary methods for inserting ads.
Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI). SSAI inserts ads directly into the content at the server end of the streaming delivery chain. It typically provides the best viewing experience, as the transitions between content and ads are much smoother with less buffering. The tradeoff is that SSAI tends to require more technical expertise to implement, and the overall ad experience isn’t very flexible. It’s also important to note that since SSAI is an integrated part of your content, this method ensures the ads are delivered instead of being blocked by ad blockers.
Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI). CSAI inserts ads directly into the video player on the user’s device. It offers a more flexible ad experience, as ads can be personalized based on user data like browsing history and inserted at any point in the video. However, since playback is dependent on the user’s device and internet connection, it’s more susceptible to buffering and ad blockers. While the overall viewing experience may not be seamless, the ad experience can be enhanced with other options like the ability to skip, click, or close an ad.
Ad Experience
Selling ad inventory will only generate revenue if the ad experience is exceptional. This means your video ad marketplace needs to be able to serve ads to your video content regardless of what format it is.
For example, while most of your content may be video on demand (VOD) or over the top (OTT), you may still want to monetize a special live event you’re broadcasting. The key is having the flexibility so that you’re able to get the most out of your video content in any format.
Furthermore, your video player should offer viewability metrics, so you can track the effectiveness of your ad experience. Advertisers don’t just want impressions anymore; they expect publishers to prove that viewers are actually seeing the ads.
Taking Advantage of Video Advertising Opportunities
Video ad marketplaces offer publishers a variety of ways to monetize their content in an increasingly competitive landscape. Understanding how video ad marketplaces work can help you reach your goals and position you to seize the opportunities this significant growth market offers.
With Brightcove, taking advantage of this opportunity has never been easier. Not only do we offer a full-service ad marketplace solution, we offer industry-leading ad metrics like ad sensitivity. Getting started with AVOD can be hard, but Brightcove Ad Monetization makes it easy to get the most revenue from your media.