According to AOL’s sixth annual State of the Video Industry report, marketers are finally re-prioritizing their traditional advertising budgets and adding dollars to digital video. The survey’s finding that TV budget growth is stagnating, with a sizable portion of those dollars being reallocated to video advertising, is long overdue.
Where is the money coming from? According to AOL’s survey of nearly 300 agencies, publishers, and brands, approximately half of the buyers who increased their digital video spending this year reported that the additional spend came from their TV budgets. And 39% of buyers said their increased digital spend is coming directly from broadcast TV, which is more than twice as many as the 18% that said this in 2012. And 31% said they were funding their digital video efforts with cable television dollars, up from 18% in 2012. Year-over-year, television remains the fastest growing source of digital video ad budgets, with display in second place.
Agencies are looking for “device-agnostic video consumption” as well as find viable alternatives to the cost of TV advertising, which, according to AOL, has increased by just under 30% since 2012. Heck, YouTube hit a billion monthly users in March 2012. If brands and agencies were really searching for “device-agnostic video consumption,” you’d think they would have discovered YouTube before now. For the past three-and-a-half years, YouTube’s viewership – month in and month out — has been roughly nine times larger than the largest Super Bowl audience in history.