Internet digital video ads forecast to boom

An explosive growth of digital video advertising for online, a platform generating earnings in excess of $1 billion internationally, is expected for South Africa's advertising industry this year.

“It all about entertainment and we're but starting to see rich-media advertising take off in South Africa,” said Richard Mullins, a director at Acceleration, an international company offering innovation services.

Goldstuck said the areas of highest expected growth in data usage in South Africa were social networks, cloud computing and online video.

“Ultimately, video ads will be made in such a way that they comfortably straddle both TV and the Internet. There are numerous areas of evolution available to video advertising, with interactive ads and mobile ads being merely the most obvious.”

The innovation to segment

“The reason that behavioural targeting will start to become bigger in South Africa this year is that the innovation to segment and target users by behaviour has in short matured to a point where it is sophisticated enough to produce significant results, but easy enough to use,” Mullins said.