Clickable Video

Video advertising is still at a relatively nascent stage on the web but make no mistake – it will be a huge part of whatever digital advertising looks like in the future. As recently as 2 years ago there was not much of it around, but it's been on a pretty steep growth trajectory (82% year on year according to the IAB). Cisco have predicted that by 2013, 90% of the web's bandwidth will be video. And wherever content goes, advertising is generally not far behind.

So it's kind of interesting that we still haven't yet necessarily arrived at the default format for video advertising on the web. Pre and post-roll is by far the most dominant format right now, but in my view it is far from the most interesting. Taggable and clickable video on the other hand, is way more interesting because it enables people to interact directly with video content rather than interrupt their content experience. One of the best clickable video technologies is You Tube Annotations (in fact I think YouTube are consistently smart innovators in this space), which has been used to create both fun interactive applications (like one of my own favourites the Hot Wheels Custom Motors Cup Challenge), and genuinely useful commercial content like the French Connection YouTique channel created by POKE.

And I rather like this technology from Wirewax that I came across the other day (HT Peter Abraham.You can try it out below) which allows you to add your own tags to objects (and people) in videos, and then add information, images, links and Flash applications which viewers can interact with. You can then get some rather neat behavioural data enabling you to watch your content through your viewer's eyes and see where people interacted, what they did, where they jumped off. For me, this kind of tech has the potential to really come alive when you're interacting through a touchscreen. Taggable, touchable, clickable. And all rather cool.

Props also to the good people at Wirewax, who swiftly came to my rescue when I was having trouble with the embed option on their video example. Thanks guys.