In this week's edition of Advertising Insights, we show the impact of video advertising in increasing your brand awareness, ad recall, and driving purchases. In addition, we take a look back at the year’s “maddest” month of advertising (on Twitter specifically) in college sports, March Madness. 

A study by Nielsen makes evident that video advertising has a significant impact on your brand, in terms of brand awareness, message association, and ad recall. Even if only viewed for a second, video ads have a positive impact on your ad efforts. According to Nielsen, even people who didn't watch the video entire are positively affected. Purchase intent increases the longer a video is watched. People who watch for less than three seconds made up a full 47% of the total campaign value, while those who watch less than 10 seconds made up 74%. As a result of this data, Facebook suggests advertisers experiment with shorter ad creative given the value increases the higher the percentage of an ad people watch. Facebook’s ad analytics let advertisers track the number of  people who receive their ad that watch it for only a small percentage of the total video time.

In the next graphic, Go-Globe sheds light on the importance of video ads with data from Asia Pacific that Nielsen collected. 80% of digital consumers in Southeast Asia are motivated to search for an item from a video ad. In addition, 64% of consumers in Southeast Asia go onto make a purchase from a video ad. Not only do video ads increase brand awareness, message association, and recognition, but they also immensely influence purchase behavior especially in Asia.

Before we let you go, this week’s insights would not be complete without mentioning the craziest month for advertisers in college sports, March Madness. Twitter is the place to be for college basketball fans in the month of March. 75% of fans follow their favorite team’s Twitter account, and 64% check their feed while watching the games. Basketball this time of year is full of upsets and buzzer-beater shots and that drama often results in increased Twitter action. Last year, from game One of the tournament to the final face-off there were over 14.1M Tweets and over 1.6B impressions. But don’t worry, engagement rates during the month stayed high, even when there wasn't a game going on, both days hanging around 4.35% higher engagement rates. So don’t miss a shot this Tournament and join Team Twitter by advertising to this audience!

 Join us next week for more insights! Until then, for more information about Social Advertising, check out our Advertising Benchmark.