We recent­ly dis­cov­ered that 300 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute and mobile makes up almost 50 per­cent of YouTube’s glob­al watch time. Mean­while, Face­book has rolled out spon­sored video ads for brands with­in the News Feed with a $1 mil­lion-a-day price tag, Yahoo recent­ly acquired BrightRoll for approx­i­mate­ly $640 mil­lion in cash, and AOL has just acquired Vidi­ble. Senior mar­keters should already be gear­ing up for next year’s cam­paigns, but what will be the top video mar­ket­ing trends in 2015 that will pro­vide new oppor­tu­ni­ties? Here are insights and pre­dic­tions from 15 of the top video mar­ket­ing experts.

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Jonathan Allen, Founder of L&T Co.

What do I think will be the biggest trend (or top trends) we can expect to see in video/YouTube mar­ket­ing in 2015? In short, cre­at­ing a video strat­e­gy that is designed to be host­ed on a domain, rather than cre­at­ing it specif­i­cal­ly for oth­er net­works that you must then rely on for expo­sure.

With con­tent that you believe could go viral, resist the temp­ta­tion to imme­di­ate­ly release your video to the largest audi­ence. The best videos aren’t always found first on YouTube, as low view counts can dis­cour­age shar­ing. Instead, pub­lish to small­er, more lim­it­ed audi­ences via niche net­works that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­play view counts, let­ting the work speak far more for itself.

I’m refer­ring to a video hosts like Vimeo and Wis­tia. You can even indulge the impor­tant few by exclu­sive­ly releas­ing the video to a cadre of friends through Face­book or a pri­vate view­ing for indus­try influ­encers on LinkedIn.

If peo­ple are delight­ed to find it, they’ll be delight­ed to share it. More­over, when it’s hard­er to find a qual­i­ty video, it cre­ates more incen­tive to share it. That’s how you “get it out there.”

And if your video still doesn’t take off at first, rest easy: the peri­od dur­ing which your video remains “undis­cov­ered” is the ide­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to reach out to all kinds of dif­fer­ent blogs, irre­spec­tive of how well-known they are. Test out a vari­ety of angles and ways to talk about the video when you con­tact them, even on pub­lic forums like Red­dit and Twit­ter. That rel­a­tive­ly few peo­ple have seen your video pro­vides a huge incen­tive for influ­en­tial blogs and com­mu­ni­ties to scoop up the sto­ry and share it exclu­sive­ly with their audi­ences.

In my expe­ri­ence, a video can remain in an “undis­cov­ered state” for months before sud­den­ly going viral and rack­ing up a mil­lion views. But you might stop me there and ask, “How do you know the view count if you’ve not been pub­lish­ing to YouTube?”

This brings me to the final part of my tip. In the peri­od between being a zero and being a hero, pub­lish to YouTube right at the tip­ping point—when the video starts gen­er­at­ing respons­es online and shows the poten­tial to go viral. You’ll cre­ate extra momen­tum and assure your­self that the low view count of a new upload won’t stay low for long.

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Rob Ciampa, CMO at Pixability, @robciampa

The bat­tle between YouTube and Face­book will be the main focus in 2015. In this war though, every­one will win. It’s not going to be a choice of one video plat­form over the oth­er; instead, suc­cess­ful brand mar­keters will put a com­bi­na­tion of the two to work.

At the prac­ti­cal lev­el, in 2015 we will enter the age of trans­paren­cy. As a result of the cor­rup­tion and ad fraud of 2014, we’ll see adver­tis­ers shift toward more main­stream video ad plat­forms in 2015, opt­ing to part­ner only with trust­ed adtech sources. Video ana­lyt­ics will play a much more impor­tant role, and we’ll see demand for more robust report­ing.

We also antic­i­pate more video ad inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, includ­ing smarter, dynam­ic anno­ta­tions and cus­tomized, geo-based anno­ta­tions. We’ll see an over­all increase in ad spend on YouTube, and more sophis­ti­cat­ed mobile video adver­tis­ing. We also expect to see bet­ter orga­nized and more effec­tive­ly man­aged chan­nels, includ­ing a bal­ance between adver­tis­ing and con­tent. We’re past the age of throw­ing spaghet­ti on the wall and see­ing what sticks.

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Crystal Dahlen, Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google

Each year, we take a look at the top ads that res­onate with peo­ple on YouTube. This year, we found that:

• On aver­age, ads are near­ly 50 per­cent longer this year, but peo­ple watched them 50 per­cent more.
  • Peo­ple watched more than 1 bil­lion min­utes of just the top 10 ads this year – 54 per­cent more than last year (2014 vs. 2013).
  • The top 10 ads were 47 per­cent longer this year – aver­ag­ing 3 min­utes in length (2014 vs. 2013).
• When we launched the YouTube Ads Leader­board in 2012, the top 10 ads earned 200 mil­lion views. This year, the top 10 ads more than dou­bled that view count, earn­ing 425 mil­lion views.

Com­mon themes of the top ads:

• From 30 Sec­onds to 3 Min­utes: Ads on YouTube have gone from tra­di­tion­al 30 sec­ond ad spots to much longer videos that tell a sto­ry. In fact, the top 10 ads this year aver­aged 3 min­utes in length – more than five times the dura­tion of a typ­i­cal ad spot. The Nike Foot­ball “Win­ner Stays” video, which earned the num­ber one spot with near­ly 100 mil­lion views, clocks in at 4:12.
• Sports events have gone YouTube: This was a big year for live sports with the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup. We found that brands are increas­ing­ly using YouTube to reach fans before and after the games. And for good rea­son – the top 10 Super Bowl and World Cup ads this year earned a remark­able 14 mil­lion hours of watch time, with 75 per­cent of those hours con­sumed before or after the events them­selves.
• Cre­ator col­lab­o­ra­tions have explod­ed: We’ve seen a dra­mat­ic uptick in the num­ber of brands col­lab­o­rat­ing with YouTube cre­ators to devel­op orig­i­nal con­tent on YouTube. Since there were so many to rec­og­nized, this year we broke out the top col­lab­o­ra­tion videos for 2014.

To cel­e­brate this year’s top ads around the world, we teamed up with Kurt Hugo Schnei­der to remix them into an orig­i­nal video to the tunes of YouTube cre­ators Scott Bradlee from Scot­tBradleeLovesya, Tay­lor Davis, Mike Relm, and Michael Thurber. You can watch “2014 YouTube Ads Rewind: A Glob­al Look Back”:

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Rob Davis, Executive Director of Content Marketing at OgilvyOne

2015 will be a year of reck­on­ing for video strate­gies across a wide swath of brands, as a matur­ing mar­ket­place increas­es busi­ness expec­ta­tions for cus­tomer engage­ment, con­tent effec­tive­ness and clear ROI. This dri­ve for per­for­mance will result in three spe­cif­ic trends to watch in 2015.

1. The Return Of Sto­ry­telling

Con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has been telling us that cus­tomers have short atten­tion spans and the only way to reach them is through short “snack­able” con­tent. Our indus­try seems to have accept­ed as fact that low video view­ing rates are the result of this con­sumer trait.

Rarely have I heard any­one sug­gest that maybe cus­tomers don’t engage because so many videos are… well… not very good. It is eas­i­er to blame the audi­ence than to force the kind intro­spec­tion that results from an hon­est assess­ment of how a brand com­mu­ni­cates.

Yet, here we are deep in the hol­i­day sea­son and the hot brand video is not a Vine. It is not micro. It is a two minute long, emo­tion­al sto­ry of a UPS dri­ver and his 4 year-old friend (full dis­clo­sure, UPS is an Ogilvy client).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IsL5AMqLMY

2. Under­stand­ing The Val­ue Of Build­ing And Main­tain­ing An Audi­ence

Brands are wak­ing up to the fact that the most suc­cess­ful video pro­duc­ers are those cul­ti­vat­ing their own audi­ences. The top YouTube cre­ators have invest­ed in build­ing a last­ing bond between sto­ry­teller and view­er, a bond cement­ed sim­ply by click­ing “sub­scribe.”

As brands become more com­fort­able with their new role as direct com­mu­ni­ca­tors, they will also take own­er­ship of devel­op­ing and main­tain­ing a direct video-based rela­tion­ship with their cus­tomers. Sub­scribers become ambas­sadors that the brand can reach sim­ply by pub­lish­ing new con­tent. Only a hand­ful of com­pa­nies are focused on this now, but it as a cus­tomer engage­ment trend that I expect many brands to fol­low in 2015.

3. Full Fun­nel Video Mar­ket­ing

2015 will be the year of full-fun­nel video mar­ket­ing. We are already see­ing signs of this trend, as brands that have played in the top of fun­nel “viral” space become more adept at using video for con­ver­sion and loy­al­ty.

At larg­er brands, we will con­tin­ue to see upper fun­nel mass mar­ket con­tent, while those with mature video strate­gies will simul­ta­ne­ous­ly align con­tent pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion to CRM and mar­ket­ing automa­tion sys­tems. For small and mid-mar­ket brands, I expect to a see a greater focus on low­er fun­nel video con­tent where met­rics around con­ver­sion are more impor­tant than views, likes or shares.

Our indus­try is done with the race to the bot­tom to make the short­est or cheap­est (or short­est and cheap­est) videos pos­si­ble. 2015 is the year of cus­tomer engage­ment and renewed video strate­gies. It will be inter­est­ing to watch these trends devel­op and see which brands rise to the top by this time next year.

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John Follis, President / Creative Director of Big Idea Video

For 2015, one trend I see is the con­tin­ued explo­sion of ani­mat­ed, explain­er-type videos.

A cou­ple of years ago, the term “explain­er video” did­n’t even exist. In 2015, I think most busi­ness­es and orga­ni­za­tions will have one.

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Brendan Gahan, Founder of EpicSignal, @brendangahan

2015 is going to be a wake­up call for many brands. Those who have forced them­selves to aban­don old habits, adopt­ed dig­i­tal video aggres­sive­ly and learned to adjust their approach­es to fit the plat­form best are going to win.

Today the major­i­ty of brands are still try­ing to find their foot­ing on YouTube and beyond. The needs and expec­ta­tions of video on one plat­form vary dras­ti­cal­ly from the next. It’s not one-size fits all.

With the launch of Google Pre­ferred this past year we saw that there is still an over­whelm­ing desire for brands to buy media the same way they bought TV 50 years ago — buy­ing media months in advance with few oppor­tu­ni­ties to opti­mize. Adver­tis­ers have tak­en a sys­tem that worked in the ear­ly days and applied it today where the same rules no longer apply.

Brands are con­tin­u­ing to fol­low old TV habits on the pro­duc­tion side as well. Pro­duc­tion is becom­ing com­modi­tized and it’s no longer nec­es­sary to spend hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to cre­ate some­thing great — although many brands still con­tin­ue to spend as if that’s the case. While brands are spend­ing mil­lions, the top YouTube cre­ators are gen­er­at­ing mil­lions of views and sub­scribers using only their web­cams and cell phones.

This kind of change is hap­pen­ing every­where with the advent of new tech­nol­o­gy — this cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ty in the space between the pos­si­bil­i­ties which new tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides and the incum­bents unable or unwill­ing to adapt.

The same way Uber dis­rupt­ed the taxi indus­try by cap­i­tal­iz­ing on new tech­nolo­gies to con­nect pas­sen­gers direct­ly to dri­vers – so too is the new ad ecosys­tem dis­rupt­ing old adver­tis­ing habits by effi­cient­ly con­nect­ing adver­tis­ers to con­sumers, with­out all the bloat and over­head costs of a bygone era. The effi­cien­cies tech­nol­o­gy has made avail­able to brands in the media and pro­duc­tion spaces weren’t pos­si­ble until recent­ly — much in the same way the tech­nol­o­gy for order­ing a cab over a mobile phone wasn’t pos­si­ble until just a few years ago.

How­ev­er, the same way taxis missed the oppor­tu­ni­ties which Uber has cap­i­tal­ized on, many incum­bent brands are miss­ing out on pos­si­bil­i­ties avail­able to them today.

The brands that are going to win are those that embrace this ecosys­tem and explore new ways of buy­ing and cre­at­ing con­tent. This means col­lab­o­rat­ing with influ­encers, opti­miz­ing media buys, and cre­at­ing con­tent that audi­ences are ask­ing for.

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Cortney Henseler, Director of Consumer Insights at AOL

When con­sumers are dis­tract­ed, adver­tis­ing pays the price. Dis­tract­ed video view­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly impacts adver­tis­ing effec­tive­ness from ad recall to per­sua­sion.

On aver­age, when peo­ple are dis­tract­ed by a device, their ad recall went down by 43 per­cent­age points. When a view­er is dis­tract­ed by anoth­er per­son, their recall went down by 52 per­cent­age points.

Mea­sure­ment, how­ev­er, has not adapt­ed to take this frag­ment­ed atten­tion into account. Reach and fre­quen­cy alone are no longer suf­fi­cient for video plan­ning and mea­sure­ment.

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Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR

Last year, most online video mar­keters spent a lot of time focused on the bat­tle for short-form video con­sump­tion. Mobile apps like Vine and Video on Insta­gram forced us to rethink a lot of assump­tions even if we con­tin­ued cre­at­ing mid-form con­tent for YouTube or Vimeo.

Next year, many of us will want to spend a lot of time focused on the bat­tle for long-form con­sump­tion. “Pre­mi­um” video con­tent offered by Net­flix and Ama­zon Prime Instant Video will prob­a­bly force us to rethink more assump­tions even if we con­tin­ue cre­at­ing mid-form con­tent for YouTube and Face­book.

In fact, if you want to see one of the open­ing clash­es in this glob­al cam­paign, then you’ll need to watch Mar­co Polo on Net­flix, which pre­miered on Dec. 12, 2104. It’s worth not­ing that the first offi­cial trail­er for the new Net­flix orig­i­nal series appears on YouTube. It shows you a glimpse of the lit­tle-known begin­nings of the leg­endary explor­er, whose life of adven­ture began as a ward of the pow­er­ful 13th cen­tu­ry Mon­gol emper­or Kublai Khan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB-ltNasHVw

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Laney Lewis, Senior Director of Marketing, Clearleap

In 2015 we’re going to see a much greater push in online video mar­ket­ing and more pro­por­tion­al spend­ing. Not so long ago adver­tis­ers were spend­ing 45 per­cent of their adver­tis­ing on TV when peo­ple were only watch­ing it 38 per­cent of the time.

Next year, I think we’ll see more of a shift toward bridg­ing this dig­i­tal divide and align­ing adver­tis­ing with con­sumer habits. Some brands have already start­ed. Take Ruf­fles, for exam­ple – they went from spend­ing about 29 per­cent of their adver­tis­ing bud­get on dig­i­tal to near­ly 100 per­cent.

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Carla Marshall, Managing Editor of ReelSEO

Brands are start­ing to real­ize that, beyond paid and owned media, there is a third way to reach their tar­get audi­ence. And that’s via earned media.

Cur­rent­ly, the ratio of fan-gen­er­at­ed video con­tent vs brand­ed con­tent on YouTube stands at rough­ly 9:1 across most of the major ver­ti­cals like beau­ty, gam­ing, and how-to and style. In the beau­ty cat­e­go­ry alone, major brands have only gen­er­at­ed 3 per­cent of the 14.9 bil­lion beau­ty-relat­ed video views on YouTube, with the oth­er 97 per­cent of views going to inde­pen­dent cre­ators. With 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can only see that per­cent­age grow­ing.

There are a huge num­ber of cre­ators that are native to the YouTube plat­form, and have devel­oped their con­tent along with the needs of their audi­ence. These Influ­encers are the ones dri­ving views, and the unbox­ing videos, haul videos, walk-throughs, and reviews they cre­ate are the ones that are get­ting the atten­tion, the views, and the engage­ment. I see a lot more brands tak­ing advan­tage of this, and team­ing up on col­lab­o­ra­tions with YouTu­bers to lever­age the audi­ence these cre­ators have built up.

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Devra Prywes, VP of Marketing & Insight for Unruly

Moment Mar­ket­ing will take off.

What is moment mar­ket­ing? It’s not about react­ing in the moment (e.g. not cre­at­ing anoth­er Oreo/Super Bowl event) – but rather iden­ti­fy­ing the moments that are mean­ing­ful to your cus­tomers and plan­ning in advance to add val­ue at that par­tic­u­lar point in time.

Mar­keters will use real-time data and real-world sig­nals to set rules that pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly boost ads (or spe­cif­ic cre­atives) against real-life events that affect con­sumer behav­ior. Here’s a few to con­sid­er:

• Weath­er: Increase the pres­ence of your Caribbean resort video adver­tis­ing when the tem­per­a­ture drops 10 degrees overnight in New York and your island has a temp over 80 degrees;
• Sports/events: Boost when the ath­lete your brand spon­sors makes a game-chang­ing move in a tele­vised sport­ing event
• TV: Inten­si­fy the reach and fre­quen­cy of your video ads for a set peri­od of time after your TV ad airs, ambush cus­tomers when your competitor’s ads are on TV, or even sched­ule your dig­i­tal spots against the ad breaks in spe­cif­ic TV shows (at a frac­tion of the cost of the TV buy).
• Shopping/location: Mes­sage con­sumers on their smart­phone in a spe­cif­ic loca­tion in or near a point of pur­chase using bea­con­s/­geo-fenc­ing.

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Dan Ripoll, Co-Founder & CEO, ContentBLVD.com

Brands will cede more con­trol to YouTube tal­ent.

The pow­er of YouTube is its authen­tic­i­ty. Fans feel direct­ly con­nect­ed to their favorite YouTube stars, mak­ing YouTube an incred­i­ble influ­encer mar­ket­ing medi­um.

As brand inte­gra­tions like prod­uct place­ments, prod­uct reviews and spon­sored videos become more pop­u­lar on YouTube, brands are learn­ing that to col­lab­o­rate effec­tive­ly, they can’t dic­tate the terms of the agree­ment.

Most mar­ket­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions have been demand-dri­ven: brands tell media part­ners what kinds of place­ments they want to buy, either through RFPs, or media buy­ers, or good old email out­reach. But a bro­ker mod­el, where buy­ers are out say­ing what they want to pay for has nev­er worked as well as a sell­er’s mar­ket­place where the peo­ple with some­thing to sell run the show. Think of eBay, Ama­zon, or your local gro­cery store; the inven­to­ry they have avail­able dic­tates what you get to buy.

Why does this apply to YouTube? Because YouTu­bers with pop­u­lar chan­nels are in demand and get­ting pitched by brands all the time.

As demand grows, sup­ply becomes more valu­able, and YouTu­bers know it. They also know their audi­ence and what kind of inte­gra­tions will play best. They have their own cre­ative vision to pro­tect. It’s what got them their valu­able audi­ence in the first place!

The brands who let YouTu­bers sit in the dri­ver’s seat will be the ones who reap the rewards of con­nect­ing with their audi­ence in fun and authen­tic ways.

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Manny Rivas, Online Advertising Director at aimClear

Expect brands’ reach into YouTube com­mu­ni­ties to widen, not only through native adver­tis­ing, but through col­lab­o­ra­tion cam­paigns with YouTube influ­encers via Mul­ti-Chan­nel Net­works (MCNs) and oth­er bud­ding ser­vices built around demand.

Devices used to access video will con­tin­ue to diver­si­fy, mak­ing a tru­ly device agnos­tic view­er. This con­flu­ence also has impli­ca­tions for expand­ed ad inven­to­ry as well as con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing options.

Third-par­ty (ad, reporting/analysis, com­pet­i­tive) tools will in all like­li­hood con­tin­ue to sur­face designed to meet needs and demands of MCN’s, brands, agen­cies, media companies/publishers and emerg­ing cre­ators.

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Tim Schmoyer, Founder of Video Creators

In 2015 I expect to see a greater shift toward sto­ry­telling among YouTube video mar­keters. Prod­uct endorse­ments and brand inte­gra­tions have been suc­cess­ful for many brands, but mar­keters are learn­ing that YouTube audi­ences build emo­tion­al, human con­nec­tions with cre­ators through the sto­ries they’re telling.

This will play out in two ways.

• Instead of just work­ing with cre­ators who share the brand’s tar­get audi­ence, brands will look for cre­ators whose sto­ries inter­sect with their own. The cross sec­tion of shared beliefs and sto­ry with cre­ators and audi­ences will result in not only the best results for the brand, but also in a cam­paign that’s extreme­ly valu­able to the cre­ator and their view­ers.
• Brands will take more ini­tia­tive to wrap their own videos with sto­ries that are mean­ing­ful to them and their cus­tomers. This kind of native adver­tis­ing will help brands cre­ate an emo­tion­al, human con­nec­tion with their own audi­ence.

In 2015 I hope many brands will use this pow­er­ful con­nec­tion with audi­ences to not only gen­er­ate rev­enue, but also to change lives for the bet­ter.

Those will be the brands that win in the long-run.

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Jeremy Vest, Founder & CEO of Vidpow

In 2015 I think many brands are going to stop using YouTube as a dump­ing ground for TV com­mer­cials and oth­er types of con­tent that large­ly don’t work well on YouTube.

Brands are start­ing to real­ize that they have to cre­ate con­tent worth watch­ing. Con­tent that is good enough to enter­tain, edu­cate or inform and con­tent that is worth a like, share or com­ment. The only way to gain con­stant views is to devel­op an audi­ence by con­stant­ly releas­ing con­tent that peo­ple want to watch.

I also think that in 2015 large sums of mon­ey com­ing from tra­di­tion­al adver­tis­ing like TV, mag­a­zines and radio will find its way to video adver­tis­ing. With­in video ads I think the indus­try will get very smart with tar­get­ing cus­tomers and mea­sur­ing ROI.

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What do you think will be the top video mar­ket­ing trends for 2015?