Unruly: Brand recall boosted by recommended brand-led video

Great video content coupled with the ability to share makes for impressive results, says Unruly following their survey of 976 online 18-35 year olds. Their research, carried out by Decipher Research, found that brand recall and association rose 7% when a video was recommended rather than stumbled across while browsing.

Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of those that watched a video recommended to them recalled the brand in question compared to 68% of those who found the video while browsing.

According to Unruly social video campaigns generated 820 million views in 2009, 2.7 billion views in 2010, and over 8 billion views in 2011. “We are likely to see the number of views delivered from social video campaigns more than double again in 2012,” said David Waterhouse, Head of Content at Unruly Media, in a guest post for Econsultancy earlier this year.

Another interesting finding is a 14% increase in the number of people who enjoyed a video if it was recommended. A recommendation also reduced the number of people who did not enjoy the video by 41%. Not only is a higher enjoyment level likely to lead to further sharing but, found Unruly, viewers who enjoyed a video had 139% higher brand association, 97% higher purchase intent, 35% higher brand favorability and 14% higher brand recall than those who did not enjoy the video.

Unruly’s free whitepaper (.pdf) about their research findings concludes that “This research demonstrates that social video significantly increases brand attention. The power of social video lies in the recommendation to view content. This recommendation comes not only from peers in social media environments, but also from authoritative blogs and news sources covering advertiser content editorially.”