A new ad by Scion borrows the best and latest ad technology: It uses Facebook Connect to put viewers in a video where they are featured D.J. at a local club and driving to the event in their new Scion. The problem? It takes a huge time for the video to load, AllFacebook says.
"No, this isn’t a few seconds that you are waiting … it’s many minutes," it said.
AllFacebook is assuming that the primary cause of the delay is the rendering model used in the site. It is unfortunate, because as AllFacebook notes, it is still the rare occasion when Facebook Connect is used to pull in information into an ad.
Interactive Reigns
Increasingly marketers are using technology to create ads that pull in viewers' images - a new level in user engagement.
Recently, for example, fashion brand Benetton kicked off a campaign for a model search in which viewers become part of the campaign. Contestants log on to casting.benetton.com, and then print a page that has a black-and-white graphic code. Then the person focuses his or her webcam on the code, and is entered into an animated video with moving images of models.
The Perils
Such ads, however, need to work - seamlessly and quickly - or users will quickly lose interest and perhaps even become annoyed with the brand.
This happens more often than it should. Even online videos - a relatively simple medium compared to the tech supporting the Scion and Benetton campaigns - is still prone to glitches.
Vevo's Launch
When online music site Vevo launched earlier this year, the opening day was a disaster for that reason, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn. The site, backed by such impressive companies as Google, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, AT&T, Abu Dhabi Media and EMI Music, had a disappointing rollout as many of the videos couldn't load, he said.
Rayburn's frustration is echoed in a recent study by video analytics company Tubemogul, which recently analyzed a sample of 192,268,561 streams from such top content delivery networks as Akamai, Edgecast and Limelight. The results were dismaying, TubeMogul found. Rebuffers are commonplace, occurring in 6.84% of all streams. More to the point for marketers, when encountering a rebuffer, viewers click away 81.19% of the time rather than wait for the video to re-load.
