Did you know that video consumption in Australia alone was up by 92% in the year 2010/11? And that by the end of September 2012 Australians had viewed 1.5 billion video streams in that month alone, averaging about 5 hrs and 23 minutes each? As humans we have 5 senses and the best form of communication is one that involves all 5 sense, or as many as you can. What then do you think is the best form of communication medium available?

The answer is of course videos – it involves audio & visual. There are schools out there also trying to incorporate our other 3 senses but that’s a whole new paradigm.

Using videos to advertise is not something that hasn’t been done before, we’ve had the television set for many years now and commercials are what we know them as. Video marketing is very much a similar concept and is the practice of creating a promotional video for a product or service and uploading it to the Internet.

Some key indicators that video marketing is expected to grow this year include:

1. Online video advertising market – grew by 58% in Australia for the year ended June 2012, and it’s expected to increase from $86 million in 2012 to $442 million in 2017
2. YouTube – launches new standalone channels, as well as being the medium for product launches of global brands GM, Toyota & Unilever
3. Device usage & internet speed – growing trend of mobile device penetration and faster internet access both wired (NBN) and wireless (4G)
4. Video platforms – there is an increasing number of video creation & curation platforms, Viddy, Vimeo, Vineapp, Switchcam

There are many examples of products that have been launched purely in the form of a video created and shared online. Popular and favourite among men are the videos created by the “Dollar Shave Club“, the series of videos by shower brand Old Spice, and one that is less obvious is the video of Felix Baumgartner jumping from near space back to Earth, sponsored by Red Bull. If we look at the number of views online for each one of these videos/channels they are 9,439,045, 227,192,936 & 32,822,626 at time of writing this respectively. That’s a bucket load of views & hours consumed online!

Video consumption in all its forms and intended purposes is increasing for a number of reasons but the main one is the interactivity and how consumable the medium is. What I mean by ‘consumable’ is that the user has a lot more to gain in terms of experience from videos than any other available medium right now. Our mind receives millions of signals from our external environment and 70% of them come from the eyes, making it the one sense that consumes the most. This particular trait of humans developed over thousands of years as it was our means of first like of defence from predators – spot them before they spot you! It’s no wonder why then that image heavy social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are going so well, and why Facebook changed to Timeline format, and why many more websites are trending towards image heavy layouts.

The next social platforms that we should be looking out for are the ones geared towards producing clips, video curation, crowd sourcing videos for live events, and there are of course businesses built purely around video production.

With all of the above in mind it only makes sense that brands start embracing the video format to get their message across to their target market. Ads on video content platforms such as the ones on YouTube are a great place to start, but I expect to see brands develop more video content as part of their marketing campaigns, similar to the 3 examples above.

Apart from being engaging to users having a video on your website has many other positive effects:

1. A study from Forrester Research states that a web page with video is 50x more likely to appear on the first page of Google
2. Increases the chance that a product is added to a shopping cart
3. Stronger brand awareness
4. Enables the brand to tell a story (and humans love stories!)

I’m sure that the first 3 don’t need an explanation why they’re good to have, but the 4th one may not be that obvious. Tune in next week for my 10th and last post on the trends and predictions for 2013.