By Brady Rothschild, Intern
YouTube is introducing a new ad package for companies looking to advertise through them. Last Tuesday (on April, 26, 2016) they announced the start of bumper ads. Bumper ads are 6-second ads that you can’t skip, rather than the traditional 30-second YouTube ad that you can skip after five seconds. These bumper ads have the ability to engage the mobile user whose attention span is much shorter and possibly save the mobile user on data costs.
Picture from: http://business.transworld.net/marketing/youtube-to-debut-6-second-bumper-ads/#AQq8GxxwTXoCKA6z.97
These 6-second spots will help companies build a story over time with their ads; this will make watching each ad like watching an extremely short TV series. The ads will need to be highly engaging for the viewers, because the time for the videos is so short each video has to capture the attention in those six seconds with enough information to keep the potential customers interested in what is coming.
Bumpers are able to stand alone, but work better when they are combined with other YouTube ads, or a link to the full YouTube video, that contains the full series. By doing this YouTube is emphasizing the importance of engaging content that drives the consumer to take action. Having the link to the full stand-alone video, can give the company a good measurement of how many people they are engaging and how quickly people want to see the full series of ads.
YouTube goes on to say that ads on their site are better at driving engagement and provide better return on investment most of the time. This makes sense, because a YouTube ad is targeted to a person, based on what Google thinks interests the person versus a TV commercial, where people have to guess based on what show is on and who they think the target audience should be. YouTube will show you one ad or now a bumper before the video you really want, where a TV commercial break has a few different commercials trying to appeal best to the affinity group they think is watching the show.
In my opinion bumpers are going to give advertisers more control of the ad they are putting out. This is because instead of putting up content on YouTube that you hope engages people to watch the whole video and get your message across; you now have the opportunity to create multiple engagement opportunities that can fit together in a bigger picture. This new ad package also gives the companies more touchpoints with consumers that will bring them in on the company’s message.
It also appeals to the modern day audience’s ever-shortening attention span, by giving a concise message that holds the attention of the viewer fitting in with the most basic of advertising principles, like the AIDA principal, but making the consumer get to the action part much faster.
How are you going to engage your customer in 6 seconds?