Video remains the hottest and most effective form of marketing content,
but many marketers are missing out on returns because they aren’t
adequately measuring video performance, according to a new survey from
Demand Metric.

For the third consecutive year, Demand Metric partnered with Vidyard,
the video platform for business, to produce “The
State of Video Marketing Benchmark Study Report” with the goal of
understanding how video performs as a content type. It also investigates
new trends around video personalization and use of video with
account-based marketing strategy, as well as examining video’s spread
beyond marketing departments.

The return on investment of video marketing has remained consistent over
the last three years that Demand Metric has asked about it. Nearly half
of participants report ROI is improving but a quarter say they don’t
know what the returns are. Determining the ROI of video is a direct
result of tracking metrics on video performance. Respondents who use
advanced analytics are twice as likely to say their ROI is better and
more likely to increase their video budgets year over year. Just 14% use
advanced analytics, and that percentage has been constant for each year
of the study.

“The use of advanced metrics has become imperative for organizations
that produce higher volumes of videos annually, as these metrics enable
optimizing performance and understanding the true ROI of their
investment,” the report said.

Viewing data is important for ROI because it also gives marketers
insights about their audience and where they are in the buying journey.
Integrating viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems leads
to deeper understanding of a viewer’s interest in making a purchase, but
those integrations continue to lag. Just 13% of respondents reported
they have integrated their data and are taking advantage of it.

Other key findings:

• More than 90% of the study’s participants said video marketing content
  is becoming more important, a consistent three-year trend.
• More than half of participants produce 11 or more videos per year.
  Large companies produce the most videos.
• The average number of participants saying that conversion performance
  for video has stayed the same or gotten better is 96%, which is
  consistent with previous years.
• The use of advanced analytics remains at 14 percent, unchanged from
  previous years.
• Using video to support account-based marketing is just emerging with
  fewer than 10% using it.
• Nearly half of respondents said they use internal staff and resources
  to produce videos, up from 38% a year ago.
• 50% said they plan to use a third-party video hosting or video
  marketing platform vs. YouTube or Vimeo, up from 38% last year.

“While many brands continue to chase the viral video hype, this report
makes it clear that videos don’t need to go viral to be successful,”
said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, which sponsored the
survey. “In fact, it’s becoming clear that personalized, targeted videos
used throughout the sales funnel are more engaging and more effective at
turning viewers into customers.”

Video, Personalization and ABM

This year’s survey explored the relationship between video,
personalization and ABM for the first time. Amplifying the effectiveness
of video through personalization and ABM is a natural progression,
Demand Metric found. More than half of the study’s participants
indicated they use personalized video content, which is believed to have
an impact on content effectiveness and ROI. In fact, 58% of those using
personalized video reported improvement in ROI compared to 43% of those
who don’t use personalized video.

Demand Metric found that video has a growing role in ABM, a strategy for
targeting prospective customers at the account level rather than the
individual lead level. Just 8% of respondents this year reported using
video with their ABM strategy, but another 6% say they plan to add video
to ABM. Similar to the tie between analytics and ROI, the survey also
found that inclusion of video with ABM is facilitated by integration of
video viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems.

Video Going Beyond Marketing

The power of video as an influential medium has helped it move beyond
the marketing department to nearly every other function in an
organization. However, marketing remains the primary user at 86%,
followed by internal communications (19%), sales teams (15%), executive
teams (11%), support teams (11%), human resources (8%) and others (11%).

This year’s survey was administered online during the period of October
5 through October 28, 2016 and includes responses from 289 people,
primarily in marketing and sales departments at B2B companies, but B2C
companies were also included.

To view the full survey report, click here: https://www.vidyard.com/resources/state-of-video-marketing-2016/

About Vidyard

Vidyard
(Twitter: @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps
businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going
beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive
greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities
of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global
leaders such as Honeywell, McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD
Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their
video content strategies and turn viewer into customers.

About Demand Metric

Demand Metric is a marketing research and advisory firm serving a
membership community of over 40,000 marketing professionals and
consultants in 75 countries. Offering consulting methodologies, advisory
services, and 500+ premium marketing tools and templates, Demand Metric
resources and expertise help the marketing community plan more
efficiently and effectively, answer the difficult questions about their
work with authority and conviction and complete marketing projects more
quickly and with greater confidence, boosting the respect of the
marketing team and making it easier to justify resources the team needs
to succeed. To learn more about Demand Metric, please visit: www.demandmetric.com.

SOURCE: BUSINESS WIRE. ©2015 Business Wire

©2016 Business Wire

TORONTO , Nov. 30, 2016 /CNW/ — Videology – a leading software provider for converged TV and video advertising – today released their « Canada Video Market At-A-Glance » report for Q3 2016. The report, based on an analysis of all impressions run through Videology’s platform in Canada in the third quarter of 2016, shows that, viewability is becoming a key concern to Canadian advertisers. The number of advertisers that leveraged ‘viewable rate’ as as an objective for their campaigns has increased from 3% in Q3 2015 to 16% in Q3 2016.

« There is an increased focus on viewability across our entire industry, so it’s not surprising to see these numbers rise, » said Bryan Segal , Managing Director, Videology Canada. « Advertisers want to know their ads are being seen by real humans that can take action and drive revenue. This has been a key focus for Videology, and clearly clients are interested in tapping our technology’s ability to deliver viewable ads as a baseline for their campaigns, on top of their broader marketing objectives. »

A consistent trend quarter-over-quarter, all campaigns run in Q3 used demographic targeting such as age or gender to reach their target audience. Outside of demo, domain, behavior and geographic location were the most used targeting tactics.

In Q3, consumer goods was the leading advertising category, increasing by 7% quarter-over-quarter. Automotive remained a key vertical, but decreased by 4% to fall into second place. 

Other key findings from the 3rd quarter analysis of Videology’s platform in Canada include:

• Most cross-screen campaigns were run across PC Mobile only (24%), with an additional 5% coming from the combination of PC, Mobile OTT together.
• In Q3, most campaigns were bought on a TV-like, guaranteed basis (86%), followed by reserved-dynamic CPM (14%) and cost-per-completed-view (1%).
• For ad duration, in Q3, advertisers shifted their focus to using more :30 spots than in Q2, rising from 38% to 50%. There was also a large increase in :20 spots used. 

Additional details and the full report, « Canada Video Market At-A-Glance Q3 2016, » can be found at this link.

About Videology

Videology (videologygroup.com) is a leading software provider for converged TV and video advertising. By simplifying big data, we empower marketers and media companies to make smarter advertising decisions to fully harness the value of their audience across screens. Our math and science-based technology enables our customers to manage, measure and optimize digital video and TV advertising to achieve the best results in the converging media landscape.

Videology, Inc., is a privately-held, venture-backed company, whose investors include Catalyst Investors, Comcast Ventures, NEA, Pinnacle Ventures, and Valhalla Partners. Videology is headquartered in New York, NY , with key offices in Baltimore , Austin , Toronto , London , Paris , Madrid , Singapore , Sydney , Tokyo and sales teams across North America .

For more information, contact Landin King at lking@videologygroup.com or 931-252-5472.

For Canadian business inquires, contact canada@videologygroup.com.

Logo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130108/NY37257LOGO

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/advertisers-increase-focus-on-viewable-inventory-in-canadas-video-advertising-market-300370007.html

SOURCE Videology

Many educators want to create interactive content for their classroom or online course. If you’re not a HTML5 programmer like most of us, but you have heard HTML5 can simplify your work and provide a great, standard web experience for your students, here’s how to get started.

H5P is a free and open source tool that helps you create HTML5 content in the browser of your choice and share it across all operating systems and browsers. To explain more about the tool, I talked to Svein-Tore Griff With, the lead developer at Joubel.com, who together with his team, created H5P. 

Don Watkins (DW): How did you get into open source?

Svein-Tore Griff With (STGW): Before working fulltime on H5P, many of us on the Core Team were deeply involved with open source projects. Over the years we have been consulted for Drupal based projects, and we’ve always tried to contribute back to the Drupal community as much as we can. H5P is installed on over 7,000 websites. It is used by hundreds of universities, including Ivy League universities. It is being used by huge companies, including Fortune 50 companies, and other big organizations like parts of the UN.

DW: What was the impetus for H5P?

STGW: The world of interactive content is almost medieval. With no common format for interactive content the creation process seen from a global perspective has become very fractured and disorganized. Simple things such as multiple choice quizzes are handcrafted again and again, not only for different platforms but for different websites as well. The cost of great interactive content and tools is often extremely high since it usually involves making yet another custom version.

The H5P format is open and the tools for creating H5P content are open source. This guarantees that creatives own their own content and are not locked into the fate and licensing regime of a specific tool. Read more about how H5P ensures that the content remains yours in our blog.

DW: How does H5P allow users to create rich content in content management systems?

STGW: H5P is a plugin for existing CMS and Learning Management Systems (LMS) systems. Just plug in H5P and your system becomes able to create, share, and reuse great interactive content. For systems that doesn’t have an H5P plugin available yet it is possible to embed content using an iframe or using the Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) standard. With the LTI and supporting APIs and specifications embedding an externally hosted H5P authoring tool is also possible.

DW: What is there about H5P that allows it to sense the device it is playing back on; i.e., iOS, Android, LInux, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer?

STGW: Usually H5P doesn’t sense the device it is running on, but there are a few cases where it does, for instance, to make full screen mode work, but it is usually just responsive design. H5P can’t control the head tags of the page where it is being used so we compare the width to the font sizes to identify break points for layout changes. You can read more about this on our blog.

DW: Why is your code licensed under both GPL and MIT?

STGW: We want everything to be MIT. Right now, there is some code from Drupal in H5P core to purify HTML. When that has been removed, we will only use MIT since GPL is more restrictive.

DW: I built a Moodle Server with the H5P plugin and saw how it connected to Moodle’s quiz feature to allow data collection of student answers. How is that accomplished in WordPress and/or Drupal?

STGW: We mainly rely on the xAPI standard for storing and analyzing the user’s answers. In addition, we save time spent and scores in all platforms and we have a special integration with Drupal’s Quiz module so that H5Ps may work as quiz questions. We’re leveraging xAPI to make this work.

DW: Are there tools built into the H5P code that allow it to store data collected from interactions with it?

STGW: There are two types of tracking in H5P. One is user tracking. Here we use xAPI. It is up to the host to determine what to do with all the xAPI data H5P generates. If the host system, Drupal for instance, doesn’t have a third-party module to handle this data, it doesn’t get stored at all. On H5P.org we send this data to Google Analytics.

The other type of is a report plugins are sending to H5P.org every month with anonymous data. It includes the number of H5P authors the site has, the number of H5Ps of each type, and more. When the plug-ins are enabled they give very valuable feedback about how H5P is used and they help guide the future development of H5P. You can disable these reports per site.

DW: Do you encourage developers to get involved?

STGW: We definitely do. The full potential of H5P will only be realized if we’re being embraced by a big portion of the web developers in the world. Developers can get involved in many ways. They can learn how to create new H5P content types and share their work on H5P.org. They can improve H5P content types through GitHub and participate in forum discussions.

The H5P code is hosted at GitHub.

Those big vikings in Canada have some big bucks to invest in games for Facebook’s latest platform.

Big Viking Games announced today that it’s launching a $10 million publishing fund to help third-party development of HTML5 Messenger Instant Games. The company has been working on HTML5 research for nearly five years, and it projects that this new platform presents the industry’s next $100 billion opportunity (though this remains to be seen). Messenger-style apps are key to game distribution in Asian markets led by companies like Tencent and Line, but that business model hasn’t caught on in the West — and Line has even abandoned the United States. But with Facebook jumping into this space, it could make this gaming business work as long as the technology functions as promised. And that could benefit a company like Big Viking Games.

Above: You can play Pac-Man in Facebook Instant Messenger — but you might find some lag.

The publisher will help game makers with development and marketing, and it’s also has a data science platform from Gallop Labs to help with user acquisition and live operations in Messenger Instant games.

These messenger games work differently than standard mobile games. You don’t download them from an app store. To play the games on Messenger, you simply hit the controller icon in the app. But during a limited play session shortly after launch today, I experienced a great deal of input lag while playing Pac-Man and Space Invaders inside Messenger while logged into a Wi-Fi network, making these both nigh-unplayable.

Also, by integrating games directly into its popular chat app, Facebook is giving developers a chance to make their games more discoverable outside of the iOS App Store or the Android Google Play market. In turn, this also gives Facebook access to any potential revenue generated by the releases on its Instant Games platform. For now, the company doesn’t plan to feature any microtransactions or other means of making money from Instant Games, but that is something that will come in the future.

“We believe there is a massive amount of talented developers that are hungry to work on new platforms that provide new more interesting opportunities around instant games on messengers,” Big Viking Games CEO Albert Lai said in a canned statement. Its Galatron launches December 15. “We are excited to partner with other game developers to leverage our know how, technology and distribution channels to help studios, of all sizes, capitalize on this new amazing opportunity with mobile HTML5 games. The focus of this publishing fund is to allow us the flexibility to work with other studios, IP holders, and companies looking to enter the HTML5 messenger gaming market.”

KITCHENER, Ontario–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Video remains the hottest and most effective form of marketing content,
but many marketers are missing out on returns because they aren’t
adequately measuring video performance, according to a new survey from
Demand Metric.

For the third consecutive year, Demand Metric partnered with Vidyard,
the video platform for business, to produce “The
State of Video Marketing Benchmark Study Report” with the goal of
understanding how video performs as a content type. It also investigates
new trends around video personalization and use of video with
account-based marketing strategy, as well as examining video’s spread
beyond marketing departments.

The return on investment of video marketing has remained consistent over
the last three years that Demand Metric has asked about it. Nearly half
of participants report ROI is improving but a quarter say they don’t
know what the returns are. Determining the ROI of video is a direct
result of tracking metrics on video performance. Respondents who use
advanced analytics are twice as likely to say their ROI is better and
more likely to increase their video budgets year over year. Just 14% use
advanced analytics, and that percentage has been constant for each year
of the study.

“The use of advanced metrics has become imperative for organizations
that produce higher volumes of videos annually, as these metrics enable
optimizing performance and understanding the true ROI of their
investment,” the report said.

Viewing data is important for ROI because it also gives marketers
insights about their audience and where they are in the buying journey.
Integrating viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems leads
to deeper understanding of a viewer’s interest in making a purchase, but
those integrations continue to lag. Just 13% of respondents reported
they have integrated their data and are taking advantage of it.

Other key findings:

• More than 90% of the study’s participants said video marketing content
  is becoming more important, a consistent three-year trend.
• More than half of participants produce 11 or more videos per year.
  Large companies produce the most videos.
• The average number of participants saying that conversion performance
  for video has stayed the same or gotten better is 96%, which is
  consistent with previous years.
• The use of advanced analytics remains at 14 percent, unchanged from
  previous years.
• Using video to support account-based marketing is just emerging with
  fewer than 10% using it.
• Nearly half of respondents said they use internal staff and resources
  to produce videos, up from 38% a year ago.
• 50% said they plan to use a third-party video hosting or video
  marketing platform vs. YouTube or Vimeo, up from 38% last year.

“While many brands continue to chase the viral video hype, this report
makes it clear that videos don’t need to go viral to be successful,”
said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, which sponsored the
survey. “In fact, it’s becoming clear that personalized, targeted videos
used throughout the sales funnel are more engaging and more effective at
turning viewers into customers.”

Video, Personalization and ABM

This year’s survey explored the relationship between video,
personalization and ABM for the first time. Amplifying the effectiveness
of video through personalization and ABM is a natural progression,
Demand Metric found. More than half of the study’s participants
indicated they use personalized video content, which is believed to have
an impact on content effectiveness and ROI. In fact, 58% of those using
personalized video reported improvement in ROI compared to 43% of those
who don’t use personalized video.

Demand Metric found that video has a growing role in ABM, a strategy for
targeting prospective customers at the account level rather than the
individual lead level. Just 8% of respondents this year reported using
video with their ABM strategy, but another 6% say they plan to add video
to ABM. Similar to the tie between analytics and ROI, the survey also
found that inclusion of video with ABM is facilitated by integration of
video viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems.

Video Going Beyond Marketing

The power of video as an influential medium has helped it move beyond
the marketing department to nearly every other function in an
organization. However, marketing remains the primary user at 86%,
followed by internal communications (19%), sales teams (15%), executive
teams (11%), support teams (11%), human resources (8%) and others (11%).

This year’s survey was administered online during the period of October
5 through October 28, 2016 and includes responses from 289 people,
primarily in marketing and sales departments at B2B companies, but B2C
companies were also included.

To view the full survey report, click here: https://www.vidyard.com/resources/state-of-video-marketing-2016/

About Vidyard

Vidyard
(Twitter: @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps
businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going
beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive
greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities
of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global
leaders such as Honeywell, McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD
Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their
video content strategies and turn viewer into customers.

About Demand Metric

Demand Metric is a marketing research and advisory firm serving a
membership community of over 40,000 marketing professionals and
consultants in 75 countries. Offering consulting methodologies, advisory
services, and 500+ premium marketing tools and templates, Demand Metric
resources and expertise help the marketing community plan more
efficiently and effectively, answer the difficult questions about their
work with authority and conviction and complete marketing projects more
quickly and with greater confidence, boosting the respect of the
marketing team and making it easier to justify resources the team needs
to succeed. To learn more about Demand Metric, please visit: www.demandmetric.com.

Facebook wants to completely remove the barrier between you and games on its platform, and it is using HTML5 to accomplish that across mobile and the web.

Instant Games are a new feature from Facebook that enable you to immediately start playing a game on Facebook’s service without having to install a game or an app. The games may show up in your News Feed when you’re on a desktop computer or even when you’re browsing on Android or iOS — but no matter what, you can click on the game to boot it up for on-demand action.

Using HTML5, which is a powerful but lightweight language for the internet, Facebook can make it so the games exist inside of its service instead of on your phone, for example. The benefit of this is that you can start a game with a friend on the company’s Messenger app, and your friend is potentially more likely to respond because they don’t have to install anything.

Above: Facebook Instant Games launch titles.

To access the games on Messenger, all you have to do is hit the controller icon in the app. Also, by integrating games directly into its popular chat app, Facebook is giving developers a chance to make their games more discoverable outside of the iOS App Store or the Android Google Play market. In turn, this also gives Facebook access to any potential revenue generated by the releases on its Instant Games platform. For now, the company doesn’t plan to feature any microtransactions or other means of making money from Instant Games, but that is something that will come in the future.

“We are always looking for ways to reduce player friction, and Instant Games on Facebook News Feed and Messenger is a wonderful solution that allows players to jump right in and immediately start playing,” MAG Interactive vice president of product Johan Persson said in a statement. “We know our players well, and we know that they will love this new easy, streamlined approach to gaming on Facebook and Messenger too.”

Facebook is welcoming developers looking to work with Instant Games. Studios just need to go here to register.

We believe over the next 12 months, billions of mobile messenger users will become prolific consumers of games and apps using HTML5 and messenger bots. This has the potential to be the most important and lucrative platform ever made available to developers and marketers — it is orders of magnitude bigger in reach from the very start than the original Facebook canvas platform or even the Apple and Google mobile app stores.