What makes great social video advertising

With video advertising growing at a rapid pace, the pressure is on brands to look towards more innovative ways of generating shareable content.

According to Lance Traore, managing director of A/NZ video ad tech company, Unruly, successful video content creation and distribution is about putting the user in control of their own viewing experience, while emotional testing and targeting drives digital strategising forward.

“The stronger emotion you can evoke in a person, the bigger the chance someone will view the whole video,” he told CMO. “The strength of an emotional connection in a particular video is the strongest indicator of what amounts to its success. So make it emotional when you are producing content. The key factor in producing highly engaging, shareable content is eliciting really strong emotional responses.”

But an effective social video advertising strategy is more than just generating great content, Traore said, especially as brands compete in an increasingly content-heavy digital environment.

“One of the myths is that great content will surface and it is simply not true,” he added. “There’s so much content out there - 25 million components of content are uploaded online every 24 hours. People are drowned in it, so you really need a strategy.”

For Traore, under-investing in distribution and over-investing in creative is one of the major blunders a brand could make, especially considering the increasing marketing demands of social media sharing.

“If you want to be successful, you need three little bubbles in one: You need to have shareable content, it needs to be relevant to your specific audience, and it needs to be integral to the brand,” he said. “Using poorly branded advertising is like throwing away your marketing budget.”

Social video advertising not only helps brands to create a direct link between content and distribution, but also evaluates content quality and uses data to optimise for engagement metrics not available on current demand-side platforms.

With video content and distribution becoming a key component of brand marketing, Unruly is already seeing international demand grow rapidly for its programmatic social video advertising solutions. The company works with brands to boost their videos shares and views online and has recently expanded operations to Australia to help ROI-driven marketers benefit from its audience data, native video ad formats and mobile video exchange platform.

Unruly’s products also include ‘Unruly ShareRank’, an algorithmic tool which evaluates, improves and predicts the viral potential of video ads.

“This is a big data tracker for video sharing,” Traore explained. “When someone shares a video via Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or Vine, it is recorded in the viral video chart. We have tracked 1.3 trillion video views and shares for the last nine years.”

The Sydney office is the 15th to be opened by Unruly since the company was founded in 2006. The video ad tech company, headquartered in London, also has offices in New York, Hamburg, San Francisco, Paris and Dubai.

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