Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers who attend­ed the Dig­i­tal Con­tent NewFronts con­fer­ence in New York City back in May seem to have had a blast, but won’t have been aware of the find­ings of a new­ly-released attendee poll con­duct­ed by the Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau.

The pow­er of dig­i­tal video

Of the five thou­sand peo­ple who thronged to take part in the event, a third of the buy-side atten­dees said the online adver­tis­ing indus­try mar­ket­place had influ­enced them in favor of buy­ing dig­i­tal video ads, while near­ly three quar­ters (70 per­cent) of the mar­keter and agency atten­dees believe that a sig­nif­i­cant bud­get shift from TV to dig­i­tal video will take place over the next year.

Grow­ing num­bers of busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers and search engine mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists are, it seems, think­ing dig­i­tal video – big time.

The week, the sec­ond annu­al event of its kind, fea­tured 17 knock’em-dead pre­sen­ta­tions from a glit­ter­ing line up of Adland’s big names, includ­ing AOL, Yahoo, CBS Inter­ac­tive, Hulu, Zyn­ga, Microsoft Adver­tis­ing, The Wall Street Jour­nal, Condé Nast Enter­tain­ment, Dis­ney Inter­ac­tive, Dig­i­tasLBi and The Weath­er Company.

The IAB’s CEO and Pres­i­dent, Ran­dall Rothen­berg, said, “This year’s Dig­i­tal Con­tent NewFronts not only shined a spot­light on the depth and breadth of orig­i­nal online pro­gram­ming avail­able in the mar­ket­place – but also pro­vid­ed a piv­otal turn­ing point in the minds of many media buy­ers, who now grasp dig­i­tal video’s pow­er and reach.”

He added, “Pre­sen­ters brought out major tal­ent, and show­cased com­e­dy, doc­u­men­tary, news, real­i­ty, music, games, and ser­vices pro­gram­ming of such orig­i­nal­i­ty and impact that major adver­tis­ers real­ized they have to get involved.”

No sur­prise 

The sur­vey polled atten­dees who had par­tic­i­pat­ed in at least one event, with lists sup­plied by the pre­sent­ing firms, and the IAB says it plans to con­tin­ue con­duct­ing such research in forth­com­ing NewFronts events in order to learn from them.

For busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers who’ve been fol­low­ing the trends, the shift of inter­est toward dig­i­tal video will come as lit­tle sur­prise. An ear­li­er sur­vey by Com­Score revealed that the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who viewed dig­i­tal video ads dou­bled to 11.3 bil­lion between Jan­u­ary and Decem­ber 2012. Fig­ures like that led AdDig­i­tal CEO Cameron Yuill to con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict ear­li­er this year that online video view­ing would dou­ble every two years until every sin­gle online ad was a dig­i­tal video.