CPG embraces online video

Consumer packaged goods leaders have accelerated their use of online video to promote brands

Consumer packaged goods leaders have accelerated their use of online video to promote brands – and raced past the automotive sector to become America’s #1 users of this advertising vehicle.

So great was their increase that online video is projected to grow 41% for the full-year 2009, according to eMarketer, as reported byAd Age. This growth trounces the 4% growth anticipated for search advertising, and declines in every other segment of online advertising.

As the value of online video spend approaches $1 billion in 2009, the largest spenders on this medium “are starting to resemble the largest spenders in TV, such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft and Unilever,” the account said.  Unilever, for example, plans to spend more on online video in 2010 because “it is where the consumer is….They engage with it a lot more than words,” Ritu Trivedi, managing partner at Mindshare Interaction, a media planner, told the paper.

For food and beverage marketers, the instant results they can see – viewers, clicks, time spent, and eventually sales lift – are like energy shots to CPG marketers more accustomed to mass media. The trend suggests to us at SupermarketGuru.com that data analysis could soon improve, that new relationships between online video and consumer purchase behavior could soon be documented – and with higher correlations between the two, CPG could start devoting real money and real creative power to online videos that could reach people on their cells, PDAs, laptops, iPhones and Androids, as well as on their desktop computers.

With that could come more immediacy between videos that help influence a purchase and trip to the store shelf, we believe – because the videos would reach people in the natural patterns of their day, inside and outside, where they can act on feelings and other triggers.  Already, Yahoo, says Ad Age, is matching video viewing with Nielsen’s Homescan panel “to determine what, if any, impact a video view had at the supermarket.”

Consumers have an appetite for online video: 11 billion videos were shown in September 2009, said Nielsen Online.  Small- and mid-size CPG marketers wanting in on this space might consider hosting services that USA Today says “are similar in operation to YouTube but offer more controls and customer service, for a fee.”  A few examples: Sorensen Media’s 360, Fliqz and VideoBloom.