Every good busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er with an inter­est in boost­ing online adver­tis­ing sales must keep his or her com­mer­cial radar fine­ly tuned on the lat­est mar­ket trends; and one dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing expert con­fi­dent­ly pre­dicts that the trend to watch is video adver­tis­ing.

In a blog for the Huff­in­g­ton Post, AdGent Dig­i­tal CEO Cameron Yuill has this mes­sage for the per­cep­tive busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er: video adver­tis­ing is doing to dou­ble very two years until even­tu­al­ly every sin­gle online ad will be a video.

The unstop­pable rise of video

Cit­ing a recent sur­vey by Com­Score reveal­ing that Amer­i­cans viewed11.3 bil­lion video ads in Decem­ber alone, Yuill argues that his pre­dic­tion isn’t remote­ly fan­ci­ful. That total was dou­ble the num­ber viewed in Jan­u­ary 2012 and ten per cent above the 10.3 bil­lion video ads viewed in Novem­ber 2012. More­over, of all the videos viewed in Decem­ber 2012, a thump­ing 22.6 per cent were video ads.

The inter­na­tion­al glob­al research firm Neil­son fur­ther but­tress­es Yuill’s fore­cast: it found that 360 bil­lion min­utes were spent online by Amer­i­cans in Decem­ber, stream­ing a stag­ger­ing 24.6 bil­lion videos between them. And after six decades of TV adver­tis­ing, con­sumers have grown accus­tomed to watch­ing com­mer­cials – many of them pleas­ing­ly brief and high­ly enter­tain­ing —  in order to get the content.

Enter the tablet

Add to that the fact which every busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er knows in his heart – that adver­tis­ers favor videos because they know peo­ple watch them – and the dimen­sions of a colos­sal shift in online adver­tis­ing become more vis­i­ble. Neil­son will be includ­ing video viewed on smart­phones and tablets in their mar­ket research rat­ings from August this year; the result, Yuill believes, is like­ly to per­suade adver­tis­ers to shift their spend­ing to online video in droves.

The inex­orable rise of the tablet, in fact, is like­ly to accel­er­ate the trend. Pre­dict­ed by research firm IDC to out­sell PCs as ear­ly as 2017, smart­phones and tablets have mas­sive­ly extend­ed the reach of video ads. You can watch them on the train, on the couch, in the cof­fee shop, or even while med­i­tat­ing in the bath­room. If IDC is right, you don’t have to be a genius to fig­ure out where adver­tis­ers are going to want to run their ads.

As Yuill puts it, “Ban­ner ads do not work, but you already knew that.”