Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Online rollover ads that let consumers move their mouse over a video promo to access more information about a brand have been a boon for publishers looking to make their videos a bit more interactive for consumers.

Innovid, a company that powers campaigns for publishers including CBS, MSN, Crackle, Hulu and Roku, is launching a beta program to make its interactive video ads compatible with social posts. Innovid's advertisers include Microsoft, Mondelez and Target.

British tea and coffee brand Taylors of Harrogate ran a campaign last December to test the technology.

A 30-second video featured a button in the corner of the screen. When users scroll over it, they can take a quiz to find their perfect coffee flavor, buy products from retailers including Sainsbury's and Asda and sign up for emails.

The new format resulted in a 35 percent engagement rate with 4,400 likes, more than 250 comments and 400 shares....

YouTube celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and with that landmark in mind, the video platform asked the advertising community to reminisce over the past decade of YouTube ads.

Google whittled down the thousands upon thousands of ads uploaded over the years to a shortlist of 20, asking adland to vote for its favorite on the Adwords Agency Blog.Combined, the top five videos have been watched for 7.7 million hours — that's over 875 years of people actually choosing to watch ads. Here are the top five....

Big-budget advertising used to be the exclusive province of, well, brands with big budgets. But no more. Now, thanks to classifieds mobile app letgo, anyone can sell any old piece of junk with a commercial that will knock a buyer's socks off.

Letgo and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky just introduced the "Commercializer." It's an ingenious addition to the second-hand selling app that takes whatever you're trying to offload and seamlessly inserts it—using motion blur, image blending, motion tracking, color correction and rotoscoping technology—into one of four comical, big-budget ad parodies.

You choose a theme—'80s action-movie trailer, home-shopping segment, prescription-drug ad or overwrought perfume spot. Then, the Commercializer scrapes your letgo profile and specific listing to integrate the item you're selling, its description and price into an amusing ad that you can share with friends. ...

In what likely is the first comprehensive analysis of actual data from big agency media buys of its kind, Madison Avenue’s major agency holding companies have boosted their spending in digital media by $3 billion during a nine-month period ending with June 2015, and most of it came at the expense of traditional media.

The data, which was released Wednesday by Standard Media Index, looked at the those months, because they happen to coincide with the so-called “broadcast year,” which is the way TV networks and stations typically account for their advertising revenues. Not surprisingly, the biggest hit in Madison Avenue’s digital media shift is coming from their TV advertising budgets.“

The results show that digital is siphoning share away from other media, with the bulk of it coming from television,” explained SMI’s Bree Sutton, noting that national TV ad spending trends have been reflecting that....