According to the latest market assessment by eMarketer, they anticipate strong growth in the amount of marketing budgets being applied to online display advertising -- in particular, commercial video content.
In the U.S. market, eMarketer forecasts that advertisers will increase video ad spending by 54.7 percent and up investments in standard banners by nearly 20 percent.
Moreover, eMarketer predicts much lower growth for traditional rich media ads, however, at just over 4 percent -- as brands turn to more engaging online video instead.
More marketers are moving beyond a typical direct-response centric model for online display advertising. They're now recognizing that despite low click-through rates, banner ads also have a residual branding benefit.
Research suggests that adding video to those banner ads can improve engagement -- increasing the likelihood users will click the ads, as well as boosting the lingering brand awareness that results from viewing creative digital media.
Consumers in North America that were exposed to a campaign that included rich media display ads were nearly three times as likely -- when compared with those who saw only standard banners -- to end up at a website, either by clicking on the ad directly or by visiting the site at a later date.
Those people exposed to banners that included online video were about 5.6 times as likely to visit a marketer's site as those exposed to standard banners.
Rich media and video made users significantly more likely to click directly on display ads -- in the case of video, the likelihood of clicking on an ad went up more than ninefold.
Web users exposed to a campaign who did not click on the advertising, when first exposed to it but who later visited the marketer’s site, were about twice as likely to be driven to do so by video or rich media -- as compared to standard banners.