One of the most effective ways that brands can publish in this age of "every company is a content company" (as Tom Foremski said years ago) is through researching their customers and presenting that data to the market. IBM is, of course, a leader in this with their global studies of CEOs and CMOs. And Adobe is as well because of the the excellent research they produce with the Adobe Digital Index.
I spoke last week with Tamara Gaffney, Senior Marketing Manager at Adobe and leader of the Index, about their most recent findings and about their purpose in bringing this data to customers and non-customers alike. Adobe has plenty of data to go around. They process more data in 27 minutes, according to Gaffney, than all the global credit card transactions that occur in a day. Moreover, Adobe not only serves a majority of the digital customers in the world through their product suite, they also have a solid history of helping publishers. Their investment in this kind of research and reporting, according to Gaffney, is "so that they (marketers) can make better marketing decisions...and make better use of our learnings."
The newest study is about video on the web, and it's a good one. Tamara will be blogging about this as well on the Adobe site, but here's what you need to know:
- What Adobe calls TV Everywhere, which is encrypted video content like HBOGo, is exploding. The number of streams has grown by 12 times over the last year. 70% of stream use is via mobile devices, including tablets.
- The implications for social marketing are also huge: Facebook dominates (75% of shared video content) among video social channels, according to the report, and the viral reach of Facebook posts increase from 26% for non-video content to 74% with video content; that's how much Facebook likes video. (Handy video infographic below.) Interestingly, Twitter referrals are also growing and video tweets are 3x more likely to be shared.
- Hand-in-glove with referral preference is the fact that once referred, video content from social, according to Gaffney, had a much higher completion rate of mid-roll advertising (88%) than with non-referred video. Further, post-roll ads from referrals have an astounding 3.1% CTR.
Many thanks to Gaffney and her Adobe team for shining a light on this topic. And here's the link to the full report to download.