YouTube ad formats
This month has given us a lot of material to remember the 80’s and 90’s, in which the boom of color TV brought many, many hours of audio visual publicity.
It would seem like someone else is trying to go back to those times, as YouTube has decided to follow TV’s steps and present two ads, one after the other, before each video.
Their plans for ads
YouTube calls them “ad pods”.
Last Wednesday it was announced that from now on and on personal computers, the pre- and mid- video ads will be bundled together before the video with some being skippable.
They are planned to roll on smartphones and TVs over the next year.
This would create an ad break of around 12 seconds, however, they could waive the need for mid-video ads.
But, why?
YouTube claims to have their reasons.
According to research done by Google, YouTube’s mother company, less ad breaks on video improve user metrics, which includes lowering the bounce rate and improving the ad views.
The platform is looking to get more users to watch complete ads, especially those who watch long content since they found out that those who watched the full ad pod presented 40% fewer interruptions.
They claim this will be beneficial for both advertisers and users.
Discover me
Also, YouTube has changed the way we discover videos.
In their blog they reminded us about when they started, how we used to share the videos ourselves through links, and boy, does time fly!
Today the YouTube experience is something each of us has to discover for ourselves, we still share videos, but the reality is that we alone choose continuously the videos we want to see.
They claim that in these last 3 years the Home videos view time has increased a tenfold. For these reasons, Home has been included on the TrueView package, which until recently, allowed us only to publish our video channel on search results and recommendations on other videos.
Same present, different wrapping
Actually, this sounds a lot like old-school TV ad breaks.
YouTube even claims that watching pre-video ads will help us avoid mid-video ads, which seems like something from back in the day when a movie would last 3 hours due to ads.
However, we can start getting our creativity on how to make something new and innovative with YouTube adpods, making it more personal and original than old-school TV.
We could even think that this is the best of both worlds since with YouTube and Google we know the kind of content the users are watching.
That means we have segmentation, real-time analytics, a variety of ad groups, and the internet’s creative freedom with the old, already proven, rules of television, it could lead into a new age of digital advertising.
Sources
support.google.com
www.marketingland.com
www.searchenginejournal.com
www.marketingdirecto.com