Can you believe we’re at the end of 2017 already? I feel like just last week, I was talking to someone about the Snapchat IPO and then to someone else about the YouTube “Adpocalypse”. New products, new announcements, and new ideas have recently risen up in the online video world to bring us to where we are today—staring smack dab at the impending new year and all the changes and trends it will bring.
But what will those trends be? And will they be important enough to warrant action on your company’s part? That depends on how heavily involved in video marketing and advertising you are. If you are, then these trends will be very important to pay attention to in 2018.
Without further ado, here are three upcoming trends in online video that will impact the way you produce and handle your content marketing for 2018.
- Livestreaming will continue going strong — Ever since Periscope showed up on the scene in 2015, the interest in, and usage of, live video has grown exponentially. Take Facebook, for example, where one-fifth of the videos shared are livestreams. Since April 2016, the daily watch time on Facebook live videos has increased fourfold. These numbers don’t even scratch the surface of the total number of views livestreams and broadcasts have seen on other platforms such as Twitch, YouNow, live.ly, Live.me, and musical.ly.
- We’ll see more and more branded content — Tubular’s “State of Online Video Report: Q2 2017” found that companies increasingly turned to sponsored/branded video content over the last 15 months to get their messages out to viewers. Audiences seemed to love this. Views on sponsored content distributed on Facebook increased 258% since April 2016, while views on sponsored content hosted on YouTube increased 99%. The number of uploads for sponsored videos on each platform increased year-over-year too.
- Companies will keep trying to fix video advertising troubles — Video advertising has gone through plenty of difficulties the last few years. The rise of ad blockers meant fewer people were seeing ads play. In addition, while some viewability standards have been reached, individual platforms and websites aren’t always able to provide the viewability advertisers want. Add in the problem of video ad fraud, and you have a recipe for a struggling—if not potentially failing—industry.
Brands started to embrace livestreaming more in 2017, and they will continue to do so this coming year. Broadcasting is increasingly becoming one of the best ways to connect and interact with audiences, fans, and consumers alike. If anything, the growth of livestreaming in 2017 helped cement the video format’s place in the media and marketing world.
Clearly, brands are discovering the power of sponsored video content. This type of content is valuable for a few reasons, not the least of which is its ability to avoid the problems currently surrounding video advertising (which we’ll cover in the last point). Branded content, when done well, is proving to be an authentic, more effective way to reach audiences and build a loyal following. In 2018, companies that haven’t already tried sponsored content should do so.
However, with problems often come clever solutions. Already, some platforms help encode ads so that browsers don’t see them as ads. Other companies are pushing the idea of working with consumers to make video advertising more relevant and less intrusive to them. For example, as previously mentioned, branded content may be the saving grace for advertisers that want to reach their audiences, simply by changing the format from “ads” to “content” that viewers want to watch and engage with. Despite all the problems surrounding video advertising, expect to see significant advancements and solutions that you can use to improve your 2018 content marketing strategy.
Author: Bree Brouwer
Courtesy: www.econtentmag.com
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