Jun Group: Virtual Currency Drives Online Video Views

Social video distributor Jun Group has issued a statement today advocating virtual currency as a leading way to drive virality for online videos, particularly brand and ad video. Jun Group calls this ad category incentivized social video and says that trading virtual currency for views helps alleviate the “shortage of premium inventory.” Videos like this most frequently appear as part of ad offer services that trade consumer action for virtual currency in partner social games.

“When most brands think of social video, they think fan pages, but the real action for consumers takes place on social games,” said Mitchell Reichgut, founder and CEO of Jun Group. ”At first, we were hesitant to use incentivized views as we’d never done anything like it before. But the results are stunning — 90 percent of viewers complete their videos and between three-to-five percent go on to share, tweet, comment, rate, or ‘Like’ them. It’s unlike any other kind of online video.”

Jun Group says it integrates directly with social game developers to offer in-game virtual currency and virtual goods incentives to players who watch sponsor videos. These in-game incentives drive tens  of millions of opt-in video views for clients using the Jun Group’s distribution network per month. Clients offering brand videos through the Jun Group’s network include ConAgra Foods and Tiny Prints. A video campaign for ConAgra’s Slim Jims brand drove 287,000 video views while a Valentine’s Day campaign for Tiny Prints drove 596,000 views.

“This was an innovative way for us to get awareness for Tiny Prints Greetings, a new line of one-to-one cards from Tiny Prints that takes a definitively edgier point of view as compared to our core stationery brand,” said Anna Fieler, Vice President of Marketing at Tiny Prints, in a press statement. “By seeing the level of engagement and interaction viewers showed with our video, we gained more confidence that our brand is in fact relevant to a broader audience with more humorous content and across more card giving occasions.”

In addition, the Tiny Prints campaign drove 16,000 visits to TinyPrints.com, over 1400 visits to Tiny Prints’s Facebook page, and more than 3400 viral sharing actions. Jun Group says its video distribution network can deliver more than one million U.S.-based incentive-driven video views per day through social game developers including KlickNation and TheBroth. KlickNation’s Age of Champions, Superhero City, and Starship Command are played by over 500,000 monthly active users while Barn Buddies is played by over 1.4 million monthly active users.

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