Chapter 6
IN THIS CHAPTER
Comparing the differences between YouTube and TV ad creative
Developing your marketing messages and gathering your assets
Uncovering the secrets of effective ads
Developing a testing methodology
In this chapter, you explore how the most effective advertising creative on YouTube is different from the conventions of TV advertising, with different story arcs and techniques to engage the viewer. You gather the key components needed to create your advertising creative, including your marketing messages and your brand assets.
You also discover the four key guidelines to consider when making an effective YouTube ad, including how you grab the attention of your audience and ensure that they act after seeing your ad. Lastly, you explore approaches to testing your video ad creative so that you can ensure that you’re constantly iterating and improving your marketing campaigns.
A common misconception amongst advertisers first approaching the YouTube platform is that because it’s video, it works the same as TV, and as a result, they can simply post their TV commercial on YouTube and expect it to perform effectively.
The reality is that YouTube has many things in common with TV, but it’s not TV. Both allow you to
With TV:
Marketers must recognize that YouTube is not TV and arm themselves with the knowledge to create advertising that works for YouTube.
A great way to illustrate how TV and YouTube are different from a marketing perspective is to look at the typical story arc of a TV commercial and compare it with an ad made specifically for YouTube. (The story arc is how the story unfolds.)
TV commercials often follow a classic narrative arc of exposition, climax, and denouement (see Figure 6-1):
Video advertisements made specifically for YouTube are different than one for TV commercials, which are described in the previous section.
Video advertisements
You can see that what makes for an effective ad on YouTube is different from the traditional thinking about how to create a TV ad.
Your video creative must address a few marketing essentials, such as the specific messages you want to communicate or legal disclaimers. Working through these requirements ensures that the ads you make will deliver to your campaign’s needs the first time, and your ad creative won’t need as many edits to go back and change things because something was omitted.
Think through a list of all the messages you may want to communicate in your ad campaign. For example, if you’re launching a new product, include the name, a visual of the product, the feature that makes it stand out from the crowd, and details on where it can be bought. If you have other messages you want to communicate, you’ll need to decide whether you can communicate all of them in one video ad creative or if you need to create a few different ad creatives.
Pull together a list of your messages
From that list, pick the most important message. For example, if you’re a local pizza chain promoting new styles of pizza and some promotional pricing, you may want to make three video ads (see Table 6-1).
TABLE 6-1 Possible Video Ads
Video Ad 1 |
Video Ad 2 |
Video Ad 3 |
|
Brand Message |
The Pizza Shop |
The Pizza Shop |
The Pizza Shop |
Product Message |
New improved thick crust |
Gluten-free thin crust |
Classic crust |
Pricing Message |
Buy 2 thick crust, get 12 chicken wings |
Buy a medium thin crust, get a small thin crust |
Great value every day. |
Call to action |
Call or click to order |
In store only. Click here for retail locations |
Call, click, or visit |
When you think of Coca-Cola, you may think of the color red, a white script text, or the particular shape of a bottle, but when you think of Pepsi, you may think of blue and its circular blue, white, and red logo. When you think of McDonald’s, you may think of the golden arches of the letter M that you’ll see at every restaurant location, or even the audio mnemonic “I’m Lovin’ It” the company uses in its commercials. These elements are examples of brand assets.
Your brand assets are the collection of signals that allow someone to easily recognize your brand. Brand assets can be visual, audio, or textual.
Brand assets include things like
When you’re making video ad creative for YouTube, you’ll want to gather all of your brand assets. Look at your list of these elements and decide which ones you must include in your video ad creative and whether any lend themselves particularly well to video. Gather all the files you need into one clearly organized folder, handy for when you get to the video production stage.
If you’re just getting started with your marketing efforts, building all of your video ad creative to be consistent with a brand look and feel can help you grow quicker than having disconnected ad creative that looks different every time. If you’re an established marketer, you probably follow a rigorous process to ensure that all your advertising follows your brand guidelines.
Often in the past, I would work with advertisers to help them develop their YouTube advertising strategy, and they would assume that they needed to shoot all new video footage. Sometimes this assumption was a barrier to making YouTube-specific advertising creative because they simply didn’t have more budget available for more video shoots. However, many of these advertisers did have a library of video assets from previous shoots that could potentially be used to create their YouTube ad creative.
If you’re a marketer who has existing video assets, it’s well worth reviewing everything in your library to determine whether you can repurpose any of it. I’ve worked with clients who were able to
Gather any existing video assets and spend some time reviewing them to see whether they apply. You’ll want to ensure that the content is still accurate and that you have the necessary permissions to use the footage.
When you’re creating ad creative for any marketing campaign, you need to think through what mandatories must be included. For example, certain advertisers, such as pharmaceutical companies, are required to include legal disclaimers. Mandatories can include
All these elements are important to include in your marketing brief. Check out Chapter 2 for how to build out a full marketing brief, which will help ensure that you make an ad campaign that is on brand and consistent with marketing campaign’s needs.
No hard and fast rules for making the perfect video ad exist, but these guidelines can help ensure success. Remember, everything can be experimented with, but following these words of wisdom can give your YouTube ad a strong chance of performing well.
Your video ad creative is competing for attention with an endless number of other videos and distractions from phones and computers that can lure viewers away to other content with just a tap.
Marketers have about five seconds to capture the attention of viewers before they skip the ad, the ad ends, or they go elsewhere. Make those first five seconds count, and you’ll convince them to stay to watch more of your ad. Don’t snag the viewers’ attention immediately, and you’ll lose them the moment they can skip.
You can create impact that grabs attention with
Visuals: Try high contrasting visuals, fast pacing using techniques like quick cuts where you cut rapidly from scene to scene, graphic treatments, and anything that you’d consider an attention-grabbing bold visual statement.
People work better than places, and celebrities, women, children, and pets, especially dogs and cats, work better than men. Sorry, guys.
In other words, YouTube is a more valuable advertising platform, delivering more attention to the marketer’s message. Attention is correlated with ad recall, which is the ability for someone who has seen your message to remember it at a later time.
Clearly including your brand in your video is going to help people remember it. Clearly including your brand doesn’t mean simply making the logo bigger or jamming as many mentions of your brand as possible into the video. Instead, think about how to brand early and often so that you immediately let people know who you are and that your brand is present throughout the video.
You can brand early and often in a variety of different ways using all your brand signals available. A brand signal is something that people will recognize and associate with your brand:
For your ad to resonate with your audience, you’ll want to make some kind of connection with the viewer. Are you making them feel or think something? Are you conveying your message in a compelling way?
Create a connection by tapping into their thoughts, feelings, and emotions with your ad creative. You can
The adage “If you don’t ask, you don’t get” applies to your YouTube ads. When your ad ends, make sure that you include a clear call to action. Designed to provoke an immediate response, a call to action is the instruction you give to your viewer. You’re asking the viewer of your ad to do something. It could be to
Your call to action needs to make sense in relation to your ad. Test different calls to action to see which people are most likely to take.
What’s incredible about any digital marketing channel, especially YouTube, is that you can test different video ad creative and see which one performs best. When you’re planning your campaign and creating your marketing messages, consider creating a few different versions to test. You can test a lot of different variables:
After you create a list of the key marketing messages you want to communicate in your campaign, you can explore how you can rewrite and tweak each message, generating a few different versions to test.
You can test your marketing messaging using the following techniques:
In A/B testing, you create two videos that each have a distinct message. You then run ads featuring either message A or B and see which one performs best.
For example, say that you’re in the marketing team for the national chain The Pizza Shop, and you’re tasked with creating video ads for its new Hawaiian pizza. You want to test which message will work best, so your short video ad’s scripts may look something like
In this example, you’re testing which redemption offer will provide the best result. Will people prefer the “buy one, get one” offer or the “free medium pizza” offer? You’ll create both video ads, run both in paid media, and then look at your redemption results to see which offer resonated best.
In multivariate testing, you aren’t limited to testing only two messages. You can create several versions of a video ad and test them all at the same time.
You can constantly rewrite and retest your marketing messages to see which ones work best, improving your marketing campaign’s results with each iteration.
Beyond testing your marketing messages, you can test different creative techniques to see which one yields a better result. While most marketers work within the guidelines and restrictions set out by their brand, you will still have lots of room to experiment:
See Chapter 4 to explore the different ad formats YouTube has available. You can experiment with ads of different lengths and behaviors to see which ones are most effective.