Study: Web Savvy Consumers Say No Thanks to Emerging Forms of Online Video Advertising

The interactive ad agency Razorfish just released its yearly “consumer experience report,” and it’s turned up some interesting findings — some so interesting, in fact, they’re hard to believe.

The report focuses on how advances in Internet technologies — specifically in online activity, social media usage, ecommerce habits and mobile access— are changing consumer behavior. Toward that end, Razorfish surveyed 1,006 U.S. consumers across four age groups, all of whom had to: have access to broadband, have spent $200 online in the past year, have visited a “community” site like MySpace, Facebook, or Wikipedia, and enjoyed or created some form of digital media, like videos, music or news.

Given the relative tech savvy of the individuals surveyed, parts of the report are unsurprising, including that most respondents are increasingly customizing their Web experiences. Indeed, more than 91 percent of respondents said that when they log on, the first thing they access is a personalized version of one the five major Internet portals —Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask.com. (Google is the most popular. More than one third of respondents said they open their computers to Google.com, or iGoogle.com.)

What might surprise are the numbers of respondents who said they are using advanced Web tools and functions. A full 28 percent of those surveyed said they use Twitter, 41 percent said that they use tag clouds with some regularity, and 52 percent said that they’ve shared bookmarks with others through services like del.icio.us. (I’d love to see the breakdown across age groups.)

The study also had some interesting data around online video consumption.  Of its respondents, 94 percent said they’ve been watching online video with some level of frequency; in fact, one third of them said they watch online video daily. Meanwhile, 84 percent said they receive videos from peers on a frequent basis, roughly half have uploaded videos, and three-quarters have shared videos with friends and colleagues.

What may prove most interesting to Razorfish’s clients: the consumers it surveyed said that while they’re open to viewing advertising with their videos, most said they’d far prefer banner ads (that they can ignore) to pre-roll ads or emerging forms of video advertising, including tickers and interstitials.

To read more of the 84-page report, or to download the PDF (it covers a lot of ground), click here.