If you happen to navigate to the satirical news source website ‘The Onion’ to read some of their popular news stories like ‘Eco-Conscious Marketing Firm Developing Alternative Sources Of Synergy’ or ‘New Prius Helps Environment By Killings It’s Owner,’ you’ll first notice one of their very successful interactive engagement videos. These video advertisements, frequently designed to promote feature films such as the new movie ‘Ted’, serve as paid advertisements that do a lot more than accumulate click-through data.

By utilizing these enhanced versions of videos, marketers directly engage with their audiences in a way which dramatically optimizes their marketing efforts. Interactive ads like those on The Onion website, MTV’s Remote Control Blog, ESPN’s NBA Finals Package, NBC’s “Friends” Ad, as well as those offered by Hulu allow users to select the specific advertisement they wish to view before watching their television episode, marketers successfully convert their advertisement from a passive, disconnected medium to an active medium promoting response, social communications (i.e, Tweeting the specific ad) and instantaneous product discovery by way of a video advertising channel.

Jivox, a leading advertising technology company, currently offers one of the best interactive video suites for companies that comes equipped with analytical tools. Using their trademarked ‘Brand Gage’ platform, Jivox collects user engagement data in real-time for video ads. This ultimately determines user intent, the buying stage, and how visitor interactions are converting into purchases, brand engagement, product evaluation, and brand awareness.

In addition, Jivox guarantees an interaction rate that is five times higher than non-interactive video ads, and utilizes their real-time analytics to create more effective A/B and multi-variate advertising testing of creative, targeting, and interactive elements to improve campaign performance.

All of these numbers sound nice. However, what about data to support these claims—data that shows interactive videos actually produce an increase in ROI?

As a matter of fact, there is. Recently, a study was conducted detailing the return on investment of these new interactive video ads that analyzed post-click user data in an effort to determine how people are interacting with the ad. This figure, termed “Brand Engagement Lift” recorded the engagement time after the conclusion of a video advertisement. These measures give marketers insight into what visitors are doing with the advertisement (such as whether they are sharing the add between friends via social media or trending sites) as well as user intentions.

The study looked at 259 interactive video ads. Overall findings revealed:

1. Average Interaction Rate was 7 percent. This rate is 480 percent higher than the 1.2 percent industry average for regular pre-rolls.
2. Marketers experience more than 20 percent brand uplift.
3. For pre-roll ads, the Average Brand Engagement Lift was 49 percent higher.
4. Entertainment interactive videos experienced the highest brand engagement lift.
5. Actions increased when users were offered other actions such as additional videos, surveys, and search functions.

A look into the above numbers clearly shows that there are substantial benefits to incorporating interactive videos into your marketing strategies. Increasing the time a user spends with a brand through interaction with a video ad translates into a major increase in return on investment compared to traditional videos.

John Robinson contributed this article on behalf of 522 Productions. 522 is a leading video production company in the DC area and you can check them out at http://www.522productions.com.