Tag Archives: youtube pre-roll

Aug 15 2018
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Advertising, Digital Strategy, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Strategy

Treat YouTube Bumpers like Print Ads

YouTube Marketing

Me finding something weird under my fingernails during my presentation about Video trends

Yesterday I was speaking in “Digital PR Strategies 2018”-seminar about how to build your brand one video out of time. While rambling about industrial shredders, Finnish midsummer buyers buying cucumbers and condoms, opportunities of Augmented Reality or how we have worse attention span than goldfish, I also talked about YouTube Bumpers (actually connected to our short attention span).

Those 6 second non-skippable ads have been talked about a lot in last year or so. One key drivers for more shorter video ad content is that majority of audience detest most advertising that is pushed to them. Pushed being the operating term; people are consuming content more than ever before and they are fed up with the bad intrusive advertising more than ever before. So if you take a cynical view, using short form content and branding from first second onwards is preparing to fail: “people will skip it anyway so let´s just be fast”.

The truth is naturally more nuanced and there is a role for different lengths of brand content. The important thing is to have distinct roles for the all the different video assets. It is therefore crucial to recognize what YouTube bumpers are and what they are not.

Bumpers are not for brand building or explaining complicated nuances about your product. However, they are useful tool for brand recall and enforcing your unique selling point (if you have any).

Therefore you should not think about 6 seconds as a grand storytelling tool*, but more like a print or OOH. You can communicate one strong message, one strong visual (that is naturally moving because it is video) and your brand. Nothing more, nothing less. Don´t get confused by that is video, think of it as print ad and probably your creative will become much better.

*And yes I have seen the 6 second renditions of literature classics. And they suck balls compared to original material (although some of them are quite funny). But no one in their right mind would even compare YouTube bumper to great literature novel, apples to oranges and so on. 

 

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Oct 03 2014
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Advertising, Insight, Strategy

Anatomy of An Insight: Don´t Skip Breakfast

Good insight comes always from human truth. But that human truth can be super simple. That human truth can also come from specific media constraints.

Pre-roll is currently the most under-utilized and boring digital advertising format, but luckily there are brands who are putting some thought to it:

EAT – Don’t Skip Breakfast from Brave on Vimeo.

Insight: People skip most of the pre-roll ads. Many people skip their breakfasts as well. Latter is unhealthy, first probably opposite. Can we combine these two skipping behaviors?

Eat is a sandwhich chain. All of the office workers skipping their breakfast at home and skipping those YouTube pre-rolls at work, are a lucrative target audience for them.

Just acknowledging the fact that the skip ad –button is there is great.
Then rewarding those who watch it to the end is just brilliant.
This is simple, but genius work from Brave.

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Dec 12 2013
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Business, Digital Strategy, Insight, Planning

Anatomy of An Insight: Burger King Anti-Pre-Roll

Accidentally I stumbled upon two Burger King campaigns this week which were on totally opposite side of the spectrum. Whopper Sellout was a disaster, but this pre-roll campaign is great:

Insight: People hate pre-roll videos. Ironically, you probably have to watch one to see the case study above. There is nothing more annoying than seeing boring ads, when you just want to see Japanese diarrhea dance. I pretty much always skip the pre-roll, expect if it really captures my attention immediately. Kobe & Messi Selfie Shootout was probably one of the latest pre-rolls I watched from beginning to end. But what if you tailor your pre-roll message to the content your audience is going to watch?

Really simple and effective idea also tied to promotional message. It would be interesting to see some stats from the campaign as well and to compare the finishing rates to regular Burger King promotional pre-roll.  My hunch is that this execution did quite well. This is also a great example that nowadays you really cannot separate creative and channel planning. They go hand in hand.

 Content is king, but context is king kong. 

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