Innovid, the video marketing platform, has released a report, Where are Brand Marketers Taking Their Video Strategy in 2018?, which presents the results of a survey completed by 140 marketing decision-makers at top brands, conducted during the summer of 2017 by Brand Innovators in partnership with Innovid. The survey queried brand marketers on how they perceive their brands’ adoption of the latest video advertising strategies, their beliefs about integrating data, their adoption of KPIs to determine success, and what their plans and expectations are for 2018 regarding their use of video to better connect with consumers.

The survey results showed that marketers grade themselves quite harshly when asked about their video advertising usage. Very few companies currently report themselves as leading-edge when asked about innovation in their video marketing strategies and tactics to appeal to today’s consumers, with only six per cent characterising their brands as innovators in video. However, marketers do have a video vision for 2018, and almost 80 per cent of respondents stated that they will increase their video advertising in 2018 to build stronger relationships with viewers. Moreover, they show widespread optimism about how they envision the coming year.

“Innovid partnered with Brand Innovators to conduct this survey hoping get honest feedback from leading companies about their video marketing efforts and expectations for the future,” said Beth-Ann Eason, president, Innovid. “Many marketers seem to be coming down hard on their own video marketing efforts, but it is also clear that there is so much untapped potential and optimism about video marketing and its impact on consumers to be harnessed in the year to come. Innovid’s expertise in partnering with brands to develop video marketing strategies enables them to solve real business problems through data-driven creative campaigns with concrete measurement and results.”

Additional key highlights from the survey include:

• Marketers are being held back by three key hurdles: budget, lack of in-house expertise and prioritisation.
• Funding is the gating factor in video advertising volume for the vast majority of marketers, though 79 per centof companies will be increasing their video advertising efforts in 2018.
• Marketers are uninformed about the costs associated with deploying customised video ads. 45 per cent of respondents don’t believe that creative can be customized into hundreds of variants for less than $20,000.
• Interactive TV ads are currently underutilised because there is a general lack of knowledge about the capabilities that current video advertising technologies provide.
• Quite a few companies (35 per cent) rely completely on agencies to deploy their video assets, showing a lack of adequate in-house video marketing expertise.
• Facebook and YouTube currently dominate the overall video ad spend, while mobile, which currently accounts for a quarter of ad spend, is still somewhat of an afterthought. OTT video platforms currently account for 9 per cent of video ad spend and are expected to rise significantly.
• Most marketers (90 per cent of respondents) understand the value of using digital key performance indicators (KPIs) in measuring the effectiveness of an online ad campaign, as opposed to using more traditional KPIs.

“We were pleased to work with Innovid to conduct this survey as it generated critical industry insights about the current and future state of video marketing,” said Marc Sternberg, Co-Founder, Brand Innovators. “The results show the lack of widespread understanding of the current state of video, budgetary barriers, and the unmet potential that video advertising has to connect with consumers on a one-to-one basis. The results also demonstrate the optimism of marketers and the huge potential that video marketing has to really explode in the next couple years.”

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