‘Shoppable’ videos are coming and Wootag helps marketers make the most of them

Scene from the music video Dia, the first Indonesian Youtube clip to hit more than 100 million views.

The first Indonesian Youtube video to hit 100 million views was a music video published in 2016.

It’s from a major music label, but clips from self-made Youtube stars like Reza Oktovian and Agung Hapsah have also been seen by millions.

Developing countries in Asia-Pacific are expected to contribute significantly to the growth of online video globally, as mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous.

Where people are paying attention, there are others wanting to divert some of it to their benefit. Marketers now think there’s a way to increase the number of people buying products right after seeing them in an online clip – with “shoppable” videos.

They let you click on something you see in the video – say you like the dress someone’s wearing. A pop-up window with product information opens and you can buy it on the spot.

In May, Instagram began testing shoppable videos with some brands, apparently with encouraging results.

Straight to the bottom line

In the past, video marketers would have layered ads on top of popular videos, in the hope that someone clicks. Or they paid video creators – so-called influences – to feature products in the video, betting on the effect that viewers will associate positive things with the brand and buy it later. Or the video itself could include a call to action, like asking viewers to visit a website.

All of this works to some extent, says Raj Sunder, founder and CEO of Singapore-based startup Wootag. But the number of views a video gets online can be faked, so you may end up paying for your ad to be seen by bots. And there’s always an element of uncertainty when measuring how much a video campaign contributed to sales, he says.

Like kids everywhere, Vietnamese youth can’t get anough of their phones. Photo credit: Trung Vo Chi.

Wootag is a cloud-based software that lets you enhance your videos with clickable hotspots that lead viewers into a purchase process. You can run them as an ads on a news sites, or post them to social media like Facebook and Twitter. Instagram and Snapchat are not yet linked up with Wootag.

Data about the viewers and how they interact with the videos across its different instances then flows together on Wootag’s dashboard.

This allows a better understanding of who the viewers are and what they like, and what type of viewer is most likely to make a purchase, Sunder says. “You can draw a direct relationship between marketing expenditure and bottom line.”

Only the beginning