Incentive videos: the new dark horse of Internet advertising!

In a sense, advertisements all have varying degrees of “disturbance” attributes, and are basically information that people passively accept. However, is there an advertising product that can make people actively watch advertisements? The incentive video ads we are going to talk about today belong to this type.

As the name suggests, incentive video is an advertising model that sets options in the App to encourage users to watch a certain video ad in order to obtain certain benefits. In the game, a benefit may be a chance to revive, get double gold coins, etc. In the app, the benefit is generally to obtain certain privileges or points.

Today we will talk about several important aspects of rewarded video ads:

1. The booming motivational video

In the early days, rewarded videos were still a very niche form of advertising. The reason was that video advertising materials were not popular enough on mobile devices, and the conversion links supporting rewarded videos were not mature enough. Today, incentive videos have become a booming mainstream advertising format and have been favored by industry giants.

Most commonly, incentive videos in games have developed into a form of advertising that users love. For deep game players, using 15 seconds of advertising time to get a chance to revive or game props has a lower cost threshold than spending money.

As for casual players, most of them don’t care about the 15-second time cost, not to mention the huge base of casual players. Incentive videos have occupied the vast majority of advertisements for Cheetah Mobile’s casual games such as “Piano Tiles” and “Dancing Line”.

According to DeltaDNA data, 58% of F2P mobile game developers used incentivized advertising in 2017. According to data from iResearch's "A Complete Reveal of China's Internet Overseas Environment in 2018" report, incentivized video revenue accounted for 73% and 81% of the total advertising revenue of China's overseas gaming apps on iOS and Android, respectively.

The huge user base and the users’ indifference to the game have quickly connected the incentive videos to various games. Among them, the WeChat mini-programs on the national platform are full of various incentive videos...

WeChat officially announced that mini-game incentive video ads are officially available, and advertisers can choose mini-game incentive ads for delivery on the delivery side.

In addition to Tencent in BAT, Baidu has also set its sights on incentive videos. Baidu's DAP platform has also issued a message: "Video ads are truly native ads for games. Among them, incentive-based video ads have the best effect. At present, advertisers are relatively receptive to video ads."

This was followed by a preview of a new feature: incentivized video ads.

Expanding our horizons beyond the gaming sector, about two years ago, non-gaming software such as NetEase Youdao had already adopted incentive video advertising formats such as “watch videos to get space” and “watch videos to get double points” , expanding incentive videos to areas beyond gaming scenarios.

Overseas, Google's mobile advertising aggregation product Admob has supported the advertising format of rewarded videos as early as 2016. As an advertising alliance that aggregates many mobile developers, Admob has always been very sensitive in terms of monetization methods.

Nowadays, rewarded videos have also become a very recognized advertising form for many Admob developers (especially game developers). According to Pop Cap, the developer of "Plants vs. Zombies", rewarded videos are related to other advertising forms, and ECPM has increased by at least 200% . By using Google's DMP big data, App advertisers can also effectively find their target users accurately through rewarded videos.

In conjunction with the advertising format of rewarded videos, Google has launched App Campaign on the advertising delivery side. In the Google Ads backend, select App Campaign, upload horizontal or vertical video materials, and select conversion goals. The Google Ads system will then be able to intelligently deliver app ads to thousands of apps that have connected to rewarded videos, thereby improving conversion results.

2. Why are there no incentive graphic ads?

This needs to start from the model of incentive videos. The core of incentive videos is to create a strong demand . Users actively choose to watch advertisements in order to meet this strong demand. The resurrection in the game is such a strong demand.

In fact, the proportion of such strong demand in an App is usually relatively small. Therefore, in terms of advertising inventory, intense video ads are much less than other ads.

We know that for advertising platforms, advertising revenue = advertising inventory ECPM sales rate. Therefore , when inventory is relatively small, advertising platforms must use the advertising format with the highest conversion rate, that is, to increase ECPM through advertising . At this time, video advertising format takes on this important task.

Some people may argue-does video necessarily have a high conversion rate?

If this is the case, why don’t platforms convert all advertising formats into videos? The answer is that, on the premise of watching to the end, the conversion rate of video is generally higher than that of pictures and texts, and human's complex dynamic senses of vision and hearing are definitely better than static perception of vision alone.

Some apps still have both pictures and videos because the video itself is static (it needs to be clicked to play, that is, the first thing you see is the picture). At this time, the advantage of the video is not obvious. But when we add the premise that the video is played to the end (this is the case with incentive videos), the ROI of the video will have an absolute advantage.

In the practice of Google's App Campaign, many advertisers have admitted that the effect of video ads is usually better than that of image ads. At the same time, the life cycle of video ad creatives is also longer. Unlike image ads, the effect drops sharply after a few days and needs to be replaced frequently.

Another reason why it seems that images and videos are developing side by side in the current advertising field is that some advertisers do not yet have the ability to produce video materials. In fact, all major mainstream advertising platforms are pushing for the transformation of advertising creativity from images and texts to videos.

Why have incentive video ads only prospered in recent years?

One of the reasons is that the increase in Internet speed and the reduction in fees have made smooth video playback possible. If we go back a few years, let alone watching incentive videos, users would have concerns about the fees when watching a normal video.

3. Do motivational videos only appear in the gaming field?

People usually think that rewarded videos only appear in the gaming field, but this is not the case. As long as strong demand can be created, the application scope of rewarded videos is much richer than we think . One example is Spotify. In foreign countries where copyright laws and regulations are well-developed, there is no "benefit" of listening to music for free on domestic platforms. Selling electronic albums is the most common way for streaming platforms to make profits, until the emergence of Spotify brought new means of profit.

Spotify has purchased the copyright of songs, and users can listen to songs for free on its software. Of course, the only condition is that you have to listen to a "motivational audio" or watch a "motivational video" every few songs. This has opened up a new business path outside of pirated and iTunes-type software.

At the same time, Spotify is also trying a new feature called "Active Media" that allows non-member users to skip video or audio ads an unlimited number of times.

Spotify will not charge advertisers for ads that users skip. This measure is an attempt to deliver more precise ads, only deliver targeted content, and increase ad conversion rates.

The stickiness of games or the lure of paid resources can motivate users to finish watching ads, but what about tool software?

A notable feature of tool apps is that they are “use it and leave”. They seem to have low dependence, but in fact, when users have needs, they will be more proactive in using tool apps. Compared with the addictive mechanism of games, users of tool apps have stronger motivations and clearer goals.

Therefore, as long as the users' high-frequency demand functions are combined with incentive videos, the traffic of tool apps will be considerable. For example, the tool app Youdao Cloud Notes encourages users to sign in daily to obtain storage space for their notes, and sets up an incentive video on the sign-in interface to encourage users to watch the video to obtain more storage space.

4. Incentivized video ads give users the power to choose

Incentive video ads cleverly increase the user's power to make choices, which is very important. Please note that it does not force you to watch the video, but gives you a choice. You can choose not to have this chance to revive, and you can also choose not to have these gold coins.

Of course, if you want, you can choose to watch the video. Don’t underestimate this selection button, it gives users an important power, and the advertisement changes from passive to active. In terms of intuitive experience, it is better than the mandatory pre-roll advertisements of video websites.

Well, now you may ask again - if this selection button can give users the initiative, then why not just let users download the advertising app directly?

This is a good question. In fact, the “points application wall” in early mobile advertising was just this tactic. So why did this more direct form of advertising decline later?

Downloading an App is a heavy and stressful behavior. When users have no perception of an App, they will delete it quickly even if they download it. If they do this purely for profit, the conversion rate will definitely be low. This form of forced downloading cannot last long, because you cannot let users download an App every time they are resurrected, otherwise they will definitely leave you.

Watching a video actually gives users another chance to choose. You can download it or not. If you download it at this time , it means you must be interested in this App, and the subsequent activation, conversion, and payment effects will definitely be good. Ultimately, advertisers look at the final ROI.

Google's Admob has been exploring the advertising model of rewarded videos. Many applications and games connected to the Google Admob platform support the advertising format of rewarded videos. On the advertiser side, Google's advantage lies in integrating rewarded videos into Google's unified App Campaign. Through App Campaign, advertisers only need to set the most basic creative and optimization goals in the advertising background, and the rest of the advertising and optimization will be automatically completed by Google's AI.

Google's efficient delivery system uses accurate data to automatically find the target audience, making App advertising very simple and efficient. For many App advertisers, in the tide of incentive videos, perhaps what you need to do is to create an exquisite video creative with high conversion rate.

Source: Weixizhibei (ID: weixizhibei)