Today, we are pleased to announce the additions of two new members to the Jun Group team: Justin Henry and Brian Soifer.
Justin joins Jun Group as Director of Sales and Brian as Regional Vice President for the Midwest.
Justin is a sales and business development specialist having served in senior roles at Blinkx and Adconion. He brings a diverse background to Jun Group with experience across digital video production and distribution, mobile advertising, cross-partner marketing and sales leadership. His previous projects have included sales of interactive ad inventory, business development, content syndication, and licensing arrangements.
Brian comes to Jun Group as a leader in Media Sales, with over 15 years experience spanning television, radio and digital. His Midwest market experience derives from a stint as an early seller with video advertising pioneer, Real Networks. He has since worked in leadership roles at AudienceScience and most recently Thrillist Media Group. Brian has sold across CPG, finance, retail, QSR’s, CE, telecomm and beer/spirits, thus bringing tremendous expertise around multiple clients’ needs with Jun Group’s suite of video advertising solutions.
The Jun Group family is excited to welcome both Justin and Brian as valuable leaders on the growing sales team!
Please visit our Jobs Page for more information about how to join the Jun Group team.
It’s that time of year again, and we’ve decided to weigh in with our shortlist of key online video and advertising trends to be on the lookout for in 2013. We hope you find these thoughts useful.
1. Social Grows Up
Having experimented with social media for a few years now, experienced advertisers are raising their expectations of the medium and demanding more refined, tangible results. According to a report we issued earlier this year entitled “The State of Opt-In Video”, advertisers are moving from sending post-video traffic to Facebook. Over the last year, brand engagement with Facebook declined 9%, while visits to the advertiser’s website rose by more than 20%. Expect this trend to increase, as brands grow more sophisticated in their use of online video ads and consumers forgo social networking sites in favor of visiting a brand’s website to learn more about the company, find a store, take part in a contest, etc.
2. Long-Form Ad Content Increases
Despite conventional wisdom in the advertising industry that shorter is better, the numbers tell a different story. Recent evidence shows that better ad targeting and more diverse ad formats make it possible for advertisers to successfully run longer-form ads. Using an opt-in video ad-model, advertisers are no longer confined to standard :15 and :30 second pre-roll spots. Seventy percent of all opt-in views in our survey came from ads over 60 seconds in length, and 87% of users watched two-minute videos to completion. As advertisers grow more comfortable with incentivized, opt-in formats, we think you’ll see a significant increase in long-form videos in 2013.
3. Ads Masquerading as Content Will Be a Hot-Button Issue
So called “native” video ads, which are made to look like editorial or entertainment content, have been a hot topic of conversation this year. The idea is appealing to advertisers, but a recent survey showed that 86% of viewers found these ads misleading. Moreover, 85% found the units either negatively impacted or had no influence on their perception of the brand. As the industry gets more experienced with online video, we predict that their perceptions about what makes an effective campaign will change. Display-oriented placements will give way to units that deliver better engagement and post-view performance. Not everyone sees it this way, of course, so look for the controversy to continue into next year.
4. Incentivized Video Will Become More Relevant in the Mobile Environment
In 2012, pre-roll maintained its position as the ad unit of choice for online video ads. In the coming year, however, this trend may begin to reverse itself in the emerging mobile marketplace. With over 2 million mobile devices being sold per day, the app-based mobile Internet will make pre-roll increasingly ineffective. In this environment, users will be less tolerant of interruptions that use precious bandwidth and take time to load due to uneven network connections. The incentivized/opt-in model puts users in control, while providing publishers with less annoying and more lucrative way to monetize their traffic. For these reasons, we foresee incentivized video playing a much more prominent role in mobilevideo next year.
Pre-roll has long been the reigning video ad format of choice, accounting for the majority of online video campaigns. While the format has numerous advantages over television, it has shortcomings as well: it’s interruptive, it’s time-limited, and it drives very little post-view engagement.
Increasingly, advertisers are turning to opt-in video as a way to deliver longer engagements, more sharing and post-view interactions, and targeted audiences.
Jun Group recently completed a survey that looked at a sample of 7.7 million incentivized video ad views from Jun Group campaigns running between May and August 2012. We compared this information to industry data on pre-roll ads. The comparison yielded the following results:
• Engagement: Users are twice as likely to interact with a brand after watching an incentivized
video ad • Completion: Viewers are 50% more likely to complete an incentivized video ad than a pre-roll
ad (98% completion rates versus 67% completion rates) • Sharing: Incentivized video ads are shared three times more than pre-roll ads • Brand Awareness: Incentivized videos are better at driving brand favorability and purchase
intent whereas pre-roll video ads are more effective at driving brand awareness.
Overall, the data reinforced our belief that opt-in video ad units provide a cost-efficient and effective alliterative to pre-roll. For this reason, we expect to see more explosive growth in the sector in 2013 and beyond.
In July 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the Hispanic population had reached 52.5 million, makingHispanics the largest minority group in the United States.
Hispanics are, on average, younger, more social and more embracing of a digital lifestyle than the average consumer. They continue to outpace non-Hispanic adoption of smartphones, and according to a recent IAB study are 9% more likely to watch online videos than the general population. What’s more, a new study from comScore and Terra found that Hispanics are more likely to be influenced by digital advertising than the average consumer, exhibiting an 80% higher likelihood of remembering a brand they saw advertised online and a 73% higher likelihood of visiting a brick and mortar retail store after seeing an online ad.
Increasingly, advertisers are looking for efficient and reliable ways to reach this highly lucrative demographic. Today, Jun Group, the premiere opt-in video platform, is unveiling a powerful new system that allows advertisers to reach millions of Hispanics and Spanish speakers.
Using its proprietary consumer screening capabilities, Jun Group is able to precisely identify Spanish-language speakers and guarantee millions of targeted opt-in video views. Jun Group has direct integrations with sites that over-index against Hispanics, as well the ability to segment audiences by mobile device and carrier. Additionally, Jun Group can pre-screen users to determine if they’re Hispanic and/or native Spanish speakers. In total, Jun Group provides access to 10MM Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users on social networks, entertainment sites, and mobile devices.
“We’re delighted to help our Fortune 500 clients reach this important and increasingly influential audience,” said Jun Group founder and CEO, Mitchell Reichgut. “Our Hispanic opt-in video feature takes the guesswork out of multicultural marketing. It’s the most efficient, reliable, and respectful way to open a dialogue with Hispanic and Spanish-speaking users.
Unlike cookies or poll-based targeting solutions, Jun Group videos are served directly to self-identified Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users. This data is attached to each user’s anonymous social profile so that they can be re-targeted, no matter what device or computer they log in from. On average, 3.5% of Jun Group users take an action after viewing (i.e., Facebook visits, store locator usage, Tweets, shares, etc.), so advertisers can expect significant earned media from every buy.
Although the feature was created to target Hispanics, the tools will also work for a variety of multicultural campaigns, including those targeting African Americans.
This morning we released a new report entitled The State of Opt-In Video and Consumer Engagement with some counterintuitive data that bucks popular beliefs about online video. Looking at the report, which is the third in our series on opt-in video, we’re seeing some important shifts, both in how advertisers are thinking about online video and how consumers are responding.
Here’s just a sample of the findings, which are based on a sample of 7.7 million user-initiated video ad views between May and August of this year:
Facebook engagement is on the decline. While visiting a brand’s Facebook page is still the most popular post-view activity, it has declined 9% over the past year.
Finding the right consumers is critical. Using a pre-screening question to identify an individual’s interests or affinities makes them 13% more likely to engage in a post-view activity.
Made for the web isn’t always the way to go. The difference in engagement rates between repurposed TV commercials and ads specifically created for the web is negligible.
Shorter isn’t always better. Ad length doesn’t have as much of an impact on completion rates as is commonly thought. 70% of all views came from ads over minute in length, while ads over two minutes were still completed 87% off the time.
Gen Y is the least likely to engage. 18-34-year-olds are the least likely to take an action after viewing.
One of the reasons that we’re really excited about this data is that clearly shows that the video marketplace is maturing from a focus on “viral buzz” into a consistent and reliable tool for driving tangible ROI. We’ve been at the heart of the online video industry since 2005, and we’re big proponents of anything that helps bring more credibility and success to the space. Hey – that’s why we’re putting out this report! If you’d like to grab your own copy, feel free to click here.
We’ve just completed a terrific campaign for Red Stag, a flavored liquor from the makers of Jim Beam. The campaign performed exceptionally well with almost 1.4 million views, a 97% completion rate, and over 30,000 post-view actions, including shares, replays, and clicks to the Red Stag Facebook page.
What we’re most proud of, however, was the targeting. Obviously, alcohol brands have specific needs, and Jun Group ensured that each and every view came from a consumer that was over the age of 21. To do this, we targeted users by their social profiles, which provide anonymous age and gender data. (Jun Group has a database of hundreds of millions of users who have watched one of our videos). Additionally, we used our proprietary pre-screening technology to age-gate each new user.
“Metrics can be meaningful, not menacing,” explains Jun Group’s CEO Mitchell Reichgut in a recent article on MediaPost about the future of online video. His piece goes on to detail the kinds of metrics and reporting that video advertisers should be asking for in order to see real ROI.
In the article, Mitchell draws a comparison between the movie Moneyball and the current state of reporting and targeting in the online video space. In the movie, Brad Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, plays the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team. Billy becomes famous in the sports world for creating a baseball team by discarding the traditional means of player evaluations and instead focusing on the data that builds a winning team. In this same light, Mitchell explains that brands need to push their technology partners to share more of the data that matters.
In short, online video is an important element of a brand’s online presence, but more work needs to be done to make it a success.
We just wrapped up a successful campaign for Friskies Treats. The video, which featured SNL’s Chris Parnell, highlighted the importance of combatting cat boredom.
The Friskies campaign surpassed its goals, delivering more than 745,000 opt-in views over the past two months. Sharing and earned media activity were also robust, with more than 26,000 users taking actions after the view.
Watch the ad for yourself and let us know what you think. Enjoy! watch?v=aN41u-gpkZQ
Today, Jun Group is releasing a new tool to break through the online ad industry clutter: it’s the industry’s largest video ad player. At 800 x 540 pixels Jun Group’s new player is nearly twice the size of the typical 543 x 370 video player. And because, like all of our ads, it’s completely opt in, it doesn’t interrupt or overwhelm viewers.
With the goal of displaying online video in a powerful and impactful way, our oversized player sets a new standard not only for size, but for customization, branding and consumer engagement. With access to state-of-the-art features including customized graphics, clickable calls to action, and rotating graphics, advertisers will now have the tools at their disposal to develop a unique and authentic experience that grabs viewers’ attention.
Plus, the larger player can have an even bigger impact on engagement and completion rates. According to Tremor Video’s findings from earlier this week, more viewers watched an ad through to completion when it appeared in a larger screen – in fact, up to 75% completion when the ad appeared in a player between 500 and 700 pixels. Jun Group already boasts some of the best success metrics in the industry (96% completion rates for 30-second videos, and 4% average post-view CTR) and given that our new video ad player taking over even a larger space, it’s expected to bring those rates even higher.
So why haven’t others tried this before? Because the screen takeover is unique to Jun Group’s incentivized viewing model, which allows users to opt-in, rather than interrupting them. By reaching consumers on their own terms and offering incentives like free Wi-Fi, virtual goods or ad-free music in exchange for viewing an ad, Jun Group empowers our advertisers to “takeover” the online experience in a way that’s mutually beneficial.
About Jun Group
Jun Group is the premier social video platform. The company’s distribution technology delivers millions of monthly opt-in video views across social networks, mobile devices, premium content sites, and YouTube. Jun Groupdistributes videos from 15 seconds to 3 minutes-long with exceptionally high completion rates and significant post-view activity, such as web site visits, coupon downloads, and store locator usage. The company’s analytics dashboard, Voyeur, provides real time data about views, shares, likes, tweets, ratings, comments, and geographic dispersal down to the state and town. Founded in 2005, Jun Group’s clients include Fortune 500 brands, major entertainment companies, and media and creative agencies. For more information, visit www.jungroup.com.
Recently, we completed a social video campaign for FIAT that introduced the new FIAT 500 Abarth.
The campaign successfully surpassed its goal by driving nearly 700,000 opt-in video views and over 27,000 earned-media actions.
Maybe a surprise to some, the “Desert video” that depicts a FIAT Abarth being raced across the sand actually beat out Charlie Sheen’s “House Arrest” video, which made a splash for being too-hot-for-tv during last year’s Superbowl.