Everyone talks about “engagement,” but what about the tactics to achieving this level of engagement. Advertisers and marketers are constantly trying to capture their audience’s attention with the same static video, and it’s not working. The industry needs to take a new approach to reaching engagement, and that’s through creating personalized video content that the viewer automatically reacts to.

There are several ways to make a video ad personalized these days. Agencies have already been using targeting capabilities (such as geographic and behavioral targeting), but this only scratches the surface. Personalization should be a core focus at the beginning of an ad campaign in order to develop customer interactivity and involvement into the actual video ads.

Some brands have already started experimenting with this. Samsung’s “Follow Your Instinct” campaign this past summer used the annotation feature on YouTube that led consumers to choose from different content segments to watch throughout the ad. According to a recent survey, we may see more campaigns like this in the future. The PermissionTV 2008 Digital Marketing Survey, announced in December, found that nearly 60 percent of respondents consider interactive video experiences to be the next evolution for online video.

The time has come for video ads to really take off, and through personalization, the future for strong ROI and high user engagement is high. Using different technologies in segmenting, tagging and storyboarding video segments, advertisers can effectively personalize video ads at the individual level to increase participation and engagement.

In order to reach an engaged audience, you need to have relevance. There is a growing trend among brands to connect with the customer using various social media tactics like Twitter and Facebook, but regardless of the channel, if the brand, message or content isn’t relevant, the consumer is not interested. It takes a personal touch to be relevant these days, let’s start at personalization.

Najam Kidwai is the founder and CEO of Real Time Content, is a leading authority on the dynamics and impact of video on the Internet, IPTV and mobile channels. He has extensive experience in designing innovative business models for the online video distribution marketplace.