Hulu Ad Swap Drastically Improves Recall, Brand Favorability, Purchase Intent and Stated Relevancy
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) examined the effectiveness of Hulu Ad Swap, which enables users to instantly swap out of a video ad they’re watching for one that’s more relevant. The findings were very favorable.
“Going into the study, our thesis was that users wanted more choice and control, and advertisers wanted to eliminate waste (via targeting) and drive better outcomes (improved effectiveness measures),” wrote Bryon Schafer of IAB.
Schaefer cited an IAB study titled “An Inside Look at Demand Side Perceptions of Video Advertising,” which quantified the criteria that advertisers, marketers, and TV and online video buyers look for in their online video partnerships. Targeting, results and reach were the most popular responses, in that order.
Video ads that a user is able to proactively swap into, as opposed to a video ad that’s served at random, performed well:
– unaided recall of the brand rose from 30 percent to 58 percent (a 93 percent increase)
– aided recall rose from 59 percent to 91 percent (a 54 percent increase)
– brand favorability rose from 34 percent to 43 percent (a 27 percent increase)
– purchase intent rose from 23 percent to 31 percent (a 35 percent increase)
– stated relevancy rose from 15 percent to 22 percent (a 46 percent increase)
“The measured performance of choice-based ad formats like Hulu Ad Swap illustrates why offering interactivity can be a powerful mechanism to improve the effectiveness of advertising,” Schafer wrote.
He cited three reasons for the superior performance of these interactive video ad formats: 1) self-addressability (“the consumer can choose the most relevant ad to them at that moment”), 2) increased attentiveness (“when a choice is made, a viewer is invested in seeing the outcome”) and 3) cognitive dissonance (“consumers like to feel justified about the choices they make”).
The power of Hulu Ad Swap isn’t that all Hulu users will swap ads, but that all users can swap ads if they choose to. Schafer noted that IAB expects response rates of about 3 percent.
According to the latest figures from comScore, Hulu generated 995.6 million video ad impressions in August, the most of any U.S. online video ad property. It delivered 426 million minutes of video ads during the month, with 38.1 ads per viewer and a reach of 8.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet population.
Sources:
http://www.iab.net/iablog/2011/10/an-inside-look-at-hulu-ad-swap.html
