You will probably hear a lot more, because they work.
Click-through rates for online video ads range from 0.4% to 0.74% depending on the format, according to new DoubleClick data made available exclusively to eMarketer.
Less than 1% may not sound like much, but it is far higher than most display ads. Plain GIF and JPG image ads typically get about 0.1% click-through rates.
Interaction with online video ads has been increasing. As the share of video ads has increased on the EyeBlaster network, for example, the interaction rate has also grown, jumping from 7% in Q1 2005 to 18% in Q3 of 2006.
Click-through is not the only goal of online advertising, although it is one of the most readily measured. It took years for online ad sellers to establish that branding is important as well.
Research released in June 2006 by aQuantive's Atlas unit looked to tie a video ad's potential effectiveness to how much of a commercial was watched, resulting in a proprietary metric called "Brand Exposure Duration."
The study produced important results for brand marketers. The counterintuitive bottom line was that "many viewers watched longer videos in their entirety. They also found that the longest video advertising actually showed the greatest viewing duration, indicating that many viewers watched this video multiple times through rewinding."
Regardless of an ad's length, its appeal (and therefore effectiveness) lies in the ad's topic or industry, the context in which it is shown (how intrusive? what's the trade-off?) and, most of all, the quality of the creative.
For a better understanding of the rapidly changing online video market, read eMarketer's Internet Video: Advertising Experiments and Exploding Content report.