Social Video Advertising in 2010

Try recalling last year’s social video ads. What came to your mind first? Probably the famous Evian Roller Babies ad or Cadbury’s Eyebrow dance.

Interestingly, the number of viral social video ads somehow skyrocketed this year.

Some of the more memorable ones are Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Nike’s Write the Future, and Pepsi’s Oh Africa social video ads.

Visible Measures, a social video analytics company, conducted a study on this year web video scene and provided us with three key findings:

1. More Brands: The number of brands participating in social video advertising exploded in 2010. In 2009, fewer than 450* brands launched social video ad campaigns. In 2010, that number more than doubled to reach nearly 1,000 brands.

2. More Campaigns: In 2009, the industry saw less than 700 social video campaigns. But in 2010, social video advertising was home to 1,800+ campaigns, a 180% increase from 2009.

3. More Views: Social video campaigns generated 820+ million views and 1.5 million comments in 2009. In 2010, these numbers increased to 2.7 billion views – a jump of over 3.3X – and 4.4 million comments. For your information, Old Spice’s Reponses campaign generated 40 times more views than all Old Spice campaigns in 2009 combined.

Social video advertising seems to be getting brands’ attention. We used to see a lot of flash mobs in the past. But nowadays, social video ads are more of a combination between product messages and entertainment. It must be fun for people to share it. The network viral effect is what brands wish to achieve. We would expect this trend to continue into 2011.

Who knows, web video could evolve to more than just being entertaining and viral. French Connection, for example, has taken the lead to set up the world’s first retail store on YouTube. Viewers can buy an item by clicking the products shown on the video. This concept combines interactivity with e-commerce. It’s an interesting idea and we hope to see more of such innovations in 2011. According to TED’s Chief, Chris Anderson, it probably will.