Why Brands are So Desperate To Get You To Share Their Vids

Did you tweet your favorite Suber Bowl ad? Advertisers sure hope you did.

Social video advertising platform Unruly released a whitepaper on social ad effectiveness after commissioning an independent study by Decipher Research. The results? Decipher found that social recommendations had a direct impact on traditional brand metrics and ad enjoyment.

Duh. We’re no strangers to social video here at Tubefilter.

Hence, Rainn Wilson’s (Dwight Schrute from The Office) and Chevy’s heavy promotion of OK Go’s Needing/Getting video during the Super Bowl (I was watching on SNF All Access NBC Sports—how great was the multi-cam feature? How great were the same six commercials over and over again?)

The study surveyed online video viewers aged 18-34 across four social video campaigns from Guinness,Coca-Cola, Unilever’s Cornetto, and Energizer Batteries to determine the impact of peer recommendations.

“Social video is a powerful format for engaging consumers. If a brand creates great video content and makes it easy to share, it will see impressive results across the entire purchase funnel,” said Unruly COO Sarah Wood.

Reports like these come out every couple of months, and they always have a big “no shit” factor, but it’s nice to know what we always felt to eb true. Online video is a better medium for advertisers.

You can go ahead and download the whole whitepaper, or I can give you get the key findings right here:

• Brand recall and brand association rose 7 percent among viewers who had been recommended the videos versus viewers who found it by browsing
• 73 percent of respondents who viewed a peer-recommended video recalled the brand when prompted versus 68 percent of viewers who had browsed to the video directly
• There was a 14 percent increase in the number of people who enjoyed the video following a recommendation versus those who had discovered it by browsing
• People who enjoyed a video were 97 percent more likely to purchase the product featured in the video

Now I’m no statistician, but I think I understand how they figured out the first three. The last one I’m still wrapping my head around. My only guess is that’s why they chose fast-moving consumer goods so they could complete the study in five months. Hmmm.

So share your videos! Especially commercials.

And while you’re at it, here is a video we produced for our friends over at Citi. Share it up!