Last week advertising company DoubleClick announced results about online advertising that found that video is a “highly effective format for online advertising.” That’s something that TV advertisers already knew, but it’s a nice confirmation that video works online as well.

Video advertising has been growing in recent years, with many sites showing muted videos, for example, that un-mute when you roll over the video. One such video I saw yesterday was from IBM(!), which showed some IT people batting at a PC like it was a pinata. It was amusing to look at, so I decided to un-mute it to see what was going on. (See the video, called “Hard Boot Pinata” on YouTube.)

Major findings:

More Interaction. Doubleclick says that audiences interact with video ads more than plain image ads, such as mouseovers, expansions, interactions with the video control buttons, clicks and other events.

Viewers See 2/3rds of Videos. On average, people play online video ads about 2/3rd of the way through the entire video. That equates to 19.1 seconds for a 30-second ad and 10.3 seconds for a 15-second ad. I found this rather surprising. Why are users not watching the entire ad? Are they bored? Annoyed at them? Have no attention span for even 15 second video ads? I think more research is needed here to find out the reasons behind this.

Higher Clickthrough Rates. Finally, Doubleclick found that click rates are “far higher” than those of image format ads. Online video ads had click-through rates between 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent depending on the online video format. By comparison, plain image ads like GIF or JPG get about 0.1 and 0.2 percent, says DoubleClick. That sounds like a no-brainer since videos are more engaging than animated ads.

DoubleClick says that it conducted its research of over 300 online video ad campaigns that were placed by more than 130 advertisers over a four-month period in 2006.

[Via iMediaConnection]