You Need to Know: Drake Morton
Video Dominates Rich Media Tactics for
Online and Direct Marketing Professionals
March 27, 2010
According to the Unica State of Marketing 2010 study, video is the most adopted rich media marketing tactic today. Videos, created by marketing, rank first followed by streaming media, YouTube, podcasts, and ads within online videos represent the rich media tactics expected to be used most in the coming year. Year?over?year growth in the next 12 months for all these tactics is expected to be in the 20% range.
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You need to understand the significance of what is taking place here.
The popularity of online video as a rich media marketing tactic makes sense considering that US internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010, according to the comScore Video Metrix service. Google Sites ranking as the top US video property with 12.8 billion videos, or 39.5% of total online videos viewed. YouTube.com accounted for nearly 99% of all videos viewed at the property. More than 173 million viewers watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month of January 2010.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have had a meteoric rise, used by hundreds of millions of people putting immense power in the hands of consumers. Blogs, product reviews, and other social media are mixed with marketing messages to shape consumers’ perceptions of the brand. The mass adoption of social media has created anguish for most marketers, but despite this  distress, almost half of the marketers surveyed currently use social media for marketing, and nearly another quarter plan to use it in the next 12 months.
 However, the adoption differs dramatically by geography. Europeans appear more tentative than marketers in North America than Europe in their current use of social media marketing. Europeans are expected to catch up as their adoption speeds up this year, with 30% expected growth versus North America’s 18%. Nevertheless, many more in Europe remain on the sidelines altogether with no plans to use social media.
Often emerging channels are not well integrated with existing marketing campaigns, says the report. Surprisingly, more marketers say they are trying to integrate these campaigns with other marketing campaigns/programs, although this does vary significantly by channel. The most widely integrated tactics are voting features/product reviews, user?generated content, and RSS feeds.
Marketers are primarily integrating social campaigns in terms of timing, creative themes and branding. As marketers expand their efforts to promote their brands, they will start to leverage integrated analysis and customer awareness, campaign decisioning, and marketing execution to make the most effective use of social media.
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