The Nielsen Company says that the number of American households that own television sets has dropped 2.2 percentage points from 98.9% to 96.7%. Half of that drop can be attributed to poverty: low-income Americans can no longer afford the ever-increasing cost of high-tech television sets. The other half of the increase, though, is traced directly to the growing trend of online users and their reliance on their mobile devices, for, well, everything. It is these consumers that is prompting Nielsen to consider a change to its definition of Television Household to include online video watchers, the New York Times says.
"We've been having conversations with clients," Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen, tells the Times. "That would be a big change for this industry, and we'd be doing it in consultation with clients if we do it."
Online Video Ad Buyers Grow
Nielsen's possible tweak in its categorization dovetails BrightRoll's third annual Online Video Advertising report, which finds that planned ad spending on online video is growing faster than all other online categories. More and more marketers - 65% according to the survey - are re-allocating budget spending away from TV and display ads.
Of the agencies responding to the survey, 27% said that more than half of their RFPs in 2010 included an online video component.
Better Targeting
When asked to compare the effectiveness of the two formats, 30% of respondents believe online video advertising to be a more effective than TV, with video advertising’s ability to target highly defined audiences cited as the medium’s most important advantage. Of all forms of targeting, respondents said that behavioral targeting is the most valuable (27%). Yet the practice has yet to become widespread among advertisers. Still, half of all agency respondents indicated that 40% or more of their ads will leverage behavioral targeting.
Why Burst Media Was Acquired Its targeting ability and TV-like exposure was one reason why Blinkx, the video search engine, said it was acquiring Burst Media for $30 million. (via Media Week). Blinkx plans to use Burst Media’s network of specialist online publishers to target online video ads from its own network, Media Week says.
