YouTube has finally decided to show ads on Smart TVs, which makes me remember. When I was little, I liked to visit the US, because everything was better. Better clothes, better toys, better streets, but what excited me the most about finally reaching the small hotel we usually stayed in McAllen, Texas, was turning the TV on and watching the ads. TV ads where born practically at the same time as TV per se.
The target: cable-cutters
For many decades we were subject to all kinds of ads, from the classic “take two Alka Seltzers” in the 60s, to the power Britney Spears and Pepsi ad in the 2000s. You could even think that marketers paid to create TV because they needed a new way to advertise their products. Maybe all these years have taught us to love with great passion what we see on TV, and maybe that’s why according to Ipsos, TV ads on YouTube have an average of 47% remembrance and a 35% intent of purchase, bigger than laptops and mobiles.
In the last couple of years, the trend of people who don’t have a cable TV service has been growing rapidly thanks to the birth of streaming services like Hulu, Amazon, Disney+ and more. This kind of audience consumes 150 million daily hours of YouTube, according to the video platform, Google Preferred Ads service gets to 43% of cable cutting millennials and 44% of casual TV viewers between 18 and 49 years old, defined by Nielsen, adding to this, users that watch ads on YouTube on their TVs is 56.8% mor likely to watch an ad instead of skipping it, which is higher in comparison to the 37.6% on mobile.
The big risks of advertising in TV
While it is true that this kind of advertising can bring many opportunities, we must also remember the main reason why millenials are cutting the cord: ads. Before the debacle of paid cable services, we had so many ads that you could swear we had more advertising than actual programming and this is even worse on free TV. Then we remember the small bit of scandal Netflix recently had after many subscribers had ads between every episode of their favorite series, reporting it with great disapproval. If we translate this to YouTube, where people use adblock to not even have ads, we can say that maybe this is not the best move for the platform. It’s even clearer when we google Smart TV ads on YouTube, the very first page is filled with results about how to block it and then there’s the actual growth of AdBlock usage, this could turn out to be more harmful, for the TV ad.
Sources
www.wordstream.com
www.variety.com
support.google.com