Why Video Advertising is Important for Brands?

Why Video Advertising is Important for Brands?

  04:33    Silver Push

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Video offers a dynamic and vibrant form of content to people. From silent films to feature films to online videos, videos have always fascinated audiences and served as one of the best means for delivering a message to the masses.

Online video advertising helps brands to communicate their messages to consumers in a highly captivating way. The following reasons will help explain why brands should adopt video advertising by leveraging the expertise of video advertising companies -

Video is immensely popular

People love to watch videos and they are increasingly watching online videos on their smartphones, laptops, and connected TVs. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Statistics show that millennials like to watch YouTube over traditional TV. As YouTube has billions of users logged-in every month, running YouTube campaigns can help marketers in promoting their brands within a short time span.  

Video offers an easy way to assimilate and share information

Video offers an easier format to understand information in comparison to text. It is more attention-drawing, and unlike text, it does not require reading and understanding words.

People love to share videos more in comparison to written content with family members and friends, and online video platforms and social media websites facilitate video sharing. Mammoth number of videos are shared regularly on various video and social media platforms. YouTube allows embedding videos on websites, emailing them, and also let users share videos on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others. Video sharing by users enables a video ad agency to target a vast audience.

Video is multi-device friendly

Video offers a highly adaptable format, allowing people to watch on their laptops, smartphones or connected TVs. More and more people now watch videos on their smartphones. As people have a short span of attention, video ads that are up to 30 seconds in length, help marketers to attract and engage consumers. Smartphones are best for showing these within 30 seconds ads.

Video quickly conveys a lot of information

Video allows marketers to convey a lot of information in a short span of time. For example, an ice cream cake company can show its full ice cream cake making process in a thirty seconds video ad, enticing viewers to grab their piece of ice cream cake immediately after watching this mouth-watering ad. This cannot be accomplished with ads made up of texts and images. Video serves as a very effective means for storytelling and enables brands to connect with consumers even at an emotional level.

Video increases the chances of converting viewers into customers

In comparison to image and text-based ads, video ads tend to be much more tempting and engaging. An eye-catching video ad with a strong call to action help marketers in attracting more consumers towards the products or services they are promoting and increases the chances of converting them into customers. By using contextual video advertising, marketers can greatly improve the conversion rate.

It is quite clear from the above discussion that why video advertising is a powerful tool for brands to increase brand awareness, inform consumers about their products and services, build consumer trust, and increase sales.  

 

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  01:36    Silver Push

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Video streaming is increasingly becoming popular. It not only offers a good source of entertainment to different types of audiences, but also provides ample opportunities to video advertising companies. An upthrust to video streaming in the past few months has been provided by the coronavirus pandemic.

A survey was conducted in June 2020 by Google to learn about the viewing habits of thirty-five hundred adults in the United States. The survey identified some key video streaming trends that will help marketers and video ad agencies to better understand the evolving landscape of video streaming. Here are the trends revealed by the survey -

Coronavirus pandemic has increased video streaming usage

The study has revealed that currently seventy-nine percent of American households avail ad-supported and paid streaming services. Six months ago, this figure was seventy-six percent. The usage of paid streaming services has grown more in the last six months in comparison to the whole of 2019.

People always want to use free, ad-supported streaming services

Although study participants said that they use more paid services now in comparison to what they did six months ago, they want to have an upper limit on this number. On an average, respondents are willing to maintain a maximum of 3 or 4 paid subscriptions for a period of more than 6 months. While survey participants want to use only a limited number of paid streaming services, they always want to use free, ad-supported services such as YouTube. This is a great news for YouTubemarketing companies.

YouTube is the top streaming service for user and creator-generated content

Taking into account both paid and ad-supported video streaming services, people are now watching 25% more news content and 27% more creator-driven video content in comparison to last six months. Participants also stated that they are now watching 17% less sports programming. For watching user and creator-generated video content, survey participants named YouTube as the top video streaming service. The mammoth user-generated content on YouTube offers a huge opportunity to marketers that run contextual video advertising campaigns.

Long-form content is getting popular and dependence on streaming services to discover content is increasing

46% of the survey participants said that they are now more likely to view videos that are more than twenty minutes in length than they were 6 months ago. Participants also said that they are depending more on video streaming services in order to discover new video content to watch. 40% of the survey respondents stated that they are more likely to view video content on the basis of what they discover, compared to twenty-one percent who are more likely to view content on the basis of a friend's recommendations than they were 6 months ago.

Return to normalcy may lead to cutting down on paid streaming services

Survey participants stated that the relaxation of safety measures associated with the coronavirus pandemic such as staying indoors may have an impact on their video streaming habits. Little more than a quarter of the participants that use paid video streaming services, are looking forward to cancel at least one of their paid subscriptions in the coming twelve months.

It is likely that paid streaming services will continue to witness ups and downs in terms of the number of subscribers. Free and ad-supported video streaming platforms such as YouTube offer a more stable option to marketers. YouTube marketing companies can capitalize on the YouTube's huge popularity and enormous content to run high-performance YouTube video campaigns.   

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Best Practices for YouTube Bumper Ads

Best Practices for YouTube Bumper Ads

  03:03    Silver Push

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Bumper ads are 6 seconds or shorter YouTube video ads that enable marketers to reach more people and boost brand awareness by showing short but memorable messages. Bumper ads are unskippable, and are considered very effective, especially for smartphones when users are viewing videos on the go.

Although there is no known best recipe for creating perfect bumper ads, the following tips can help you make better bumper ads for your YouTube campaigns -

Be Focused

Bumper ads just provide 6 seconds to marketers to convey their messages. You cannot fit all of the elements of long-format video ads such as little story, service or product info, offer, tagline, branding, etc. into the 6 seconds format. So, rather than creating a mess, just focus on what you really want to communicate to consumers. Bumper ads perform well when they are a part of your YouTube contextual targeting strategy. This further strengthens the importance of creating a focused bumper ad.

Begin Ad with a Striking and Clear Signal

It is a good practice to begin your ad with a clear and striking visual signal. It will help viewers to orient themselves towards your ad and will clue them that they have entered into your brand’s space. This approach will also prevent users from getting confused.

Include Impactful and Memorable Elements

Whether you cut down an already created 30 seconds video ad into 6 seconds or create a new video, always include those elements that makes your ad powerful, impactful and memorable. Keep in your mind that your 6 seconds bumper ad can also act as an amplifier for your other advertising campaigns. You can even create great bumper ads by using simple approaches such as using a striking headline along with a captivating piece of music.

End Your Ad with a Final Thought or CTA

Ending your ads abruptly will not serve the purpose of your YouTube video campaign and will also leave your viewers confused. It is important to provide your viewers a clear-cut final thought or call to action (CTA). You can use around two seconds of your ad for this purpose.

Create a Series of Bumper Ads

Some of the highly successful YouTube campaigns go beyond a single bumper ad to a series of them. This help marketers present different facets of a brand’s message to viewers. Creating variations of a bumper ad reinforces the message it wants to convey and cast a high impact on viewers, while allowing the ad to keep fresh. Building in series not only allows pulling viewers fast, but also enables marketers to apply different ideas while using the same ad format.

Bumper ads offer a great way to marketers for accomplishing their YouTube ad targeting goals as they can be used singly, combined together to unfold a big story, or used with other video ad formats to amplify them.

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  03:54    Silver Push

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YouTube is the most popular video hosting website in the world with most extensive catalog of online videos. The number of monthly logged-in users on YouTube is about 2 billion. YouTube offers tremendous opportunities to advertisers.

YouTube provides a wide range of ad formats and varied targeting options to marketers, enabling them to effectively and easily reach their target audience. It is important for marketers to use the right YouTube targeting options in order to drive success to their YouTube advertising campaigns. Using basic keyword and topic targeting at the start may not result in success. Below are discussed some handpicked ways that you as a marketer can use for effective targeting on YouTube -

Custom Intent Audiences

This targeting option helps marketers in reaching new customers on YouTube on the basis of the keywords used by the users to search for products and services on Google.com. It is not necessary that these audiences have any previous interaction with your brand. These are built from users who have recently searched the keywords that were used by you for to creating your audience.

Some of the great custom intent audiences that you can test out for your video advertising campaigns on YouTube are -

·       Converting search queries - You can use your list of converting queries from your search campaigns to display video ads to users who have searched for these queries.

·       Converting keywords – These keywords are not the same as converting search queries. You can create a different audience based on these.

·       Competitor terms - These allow you to show your video ads to users that are actively searching for your competitors. 

·       Best-selling products - You can create an audience from your best-selling products. You can easily find these products from the sales report of your e-commerce platform. 

Life Events

Life Events can prove to be a great targeting option. It allows you to show ads to customers during life milestones such as starting a business, graduating from college, changing or starting a job, getting married, purchasing a house, retiring from job, etc.

These life events provide a great opportunity to brands, which offer products or services needed in these moments, to emotionally connect with consumers. For effective targeting via life events, your video creative should clearly show consumers how your brand can help them go through these milestones smoothly.

Customer Match

Customer match allows marketers to target audiences by making use of the first-party online and offline data, i.e. the information shared by the customers. It enables marketers to target ads to their customers and to new audiences similar to them.

Ad Pods

YouTube's ad pod delivery method shows two ads back to back, i.e. one ad right after the other. Combining two ads in an ad pod, instead of showing them separately, provides an ad experience similar to the TV ads. Ad pods result in fewer ad break interruptions, which in turn increases the rates of both content and ad viewing.

TrueView Discovery Ads

TrueView discovery ads appear on the search results and watch pages on YouTube. YouTube is a huge search engine, next only to Google.com. It allows users to conduct search for specific videos that they are interested in. TrueView discovery ads campaign is unique as a video advertising campaign as it is the only one in Google Ads that allows marketers to target just the YouTube's search results page.

Combining keyword targeting with TrueView discovery campaigns offers a great way to capitalize on user intent. By running TrueView discovery ad campaigns, marketers can take over the top spot of the search results page on YouTube.

Video Ad Sequencing

Video ad sequencing enables marketers to use a series of video ads in a customized order to state their product or brand story to consumers. This YouTube marketing tool helps in building consumers' interest in the brand and its products or services.

Custom Affinity Audiences

This targeting method allows marketers to build audiences that are specifically interested in the products their brands make rather than the broad product categories. For example, if your brand makes running shoes, then you can specifically reach runners instead of those generally interested in sports.

In-Market Audiences

By using this targeting option, marketers can target audiences that are actively researching, comparing, and considering purchasing products or services that their brands offer.

Director Mix

Director Mix is a great video advertising tool offered by Google that allows easy creation of multiple versions of a video at scale. Thus, marketers can easily customize video ads for different audiences, languages and locations. This tool allows easy swapping out of elements such as sound, images and text in order to deliver video ads tailored to specific audiences. Even the creative can be fully changed without any loss of quality.  

Real-Time Triggers

By using real-time triggers, marketers can time their YouTube ads to align with significant moments associated with specific events such as a goal in a football match. This feature allows marketers to capitalize on consumers' cross-screen behavior.

Similar Audiences

This YouTube targeting feature helps marketers by automatically finding new audiences similar to those already existing in their remarketing lists. In order to find the like-minded audiences, Google makes use of a machine learning algorithm.

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What's New in YouTube Advertising for Marketers?

What's New in YouTube Advertising for Marketers? 

  00:44    Silver Push

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Marketers are well aware of the advantages afforded by YouTube advertising. YouTube ads help in generating and spreading brand awareness, and in increasing sales.  

From time to time, YouTube updates its platform by adding new features. Adopting these new features into video advertising campaigns on YouTube can help marketers in connecting with users more meaningfully and effectively, and in boosting performance of their campaigns.  

Below are discussed some of the new features incorporated into the YouTube advertising platform -    

Direct Response Shoppable Ad Format  

In June 2020, YouTube announced a new ad format known as the direct response ad format. This new format will help brands by making video ads on YouTube video more shoppable. This new format adds browsable images of products beneath the video ad. This helps in driving traffic directly to the product pages. This new format comes at a time when people are increasingly shopping through e-commerce platforms to avoid chances of getting infected by shopping through physical stores.  

Video Action Campaigns  

YouTube also announced video action campaigns in June 2020. This feature offers a cost-effective and easy way to marketers to increase the number of conversions. It works by showing video ads that drive action automatically to the following - home feed, watch pages, and Google video partners. All of this happens within one single campaign. Any future inventory that becomes available will be included by YouTube. This new feature will help marketers in saving their precious time for focusing on important tasks such as building the right creative.  

Video Reach Campaigns  

Video reach campaigns provide an easy and efficient way to marketers for achieving their video advertising goals on YouTube. With this feature, marketers are able to upload multiple video creatives into just a single advertising campaign. It saves them from managing separate campaigns for different types of ads such as bumper ads and skippable / non-skippable in-stream ads. A machine learning (ML) algorithm, developed by Google, automatically displays the most efficient combo of the video ad formats in order to help marketers reach their audiences at scale.  

YouTube Masthead  

YouTube Masthead allows marketers to showcase brands, or their products or services, in the YouTube Home feed. The ad gets displayed across all devices. YouTube Masthead offers a highly effective solution for driving massive reach and allows marketers to plan their buys in advance without depending on auction. As this ad is placed on the YouTube's home page, it provides an extreme opportunity to marketers to show off their brands.  

Instant Review / Instant Reserve  

YouTube's Instant Review tool allows marketers to reserve ad space for up to one hundred and twenty days in advance. This happens through an automated process and does not require any minimum spend. By using this tool, marketers can book campaigns in advance with a defined budget. Using this tool to reserve ad campaigns in advance is similar to scheduling ads on TV, enabling marketers to secure spots beforehand for future important events.  

Augmented Reality (AR) Try-On Ads  

Augmented Reality (AR) involves superimposing digital content such as sound, images and text onto the world we see. YouTube's AR Try-On ads are shown to users in a split-screen format. Video plays on the top part of the split-screen while camera view appears at the bottom. A user can then see what he or she looks like after trying the make-up featured in the video.   

By using these new YouTube advertising features, marketers can run more effective campaigns and gain a competitive edge.    

  

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Using TV Sync to Capitalize on Virtual Sports

Using TV Sync to Capitalize on Virtual Sports

  06:14    Silver Push

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Amid the coronavirus pandemic, traditional live sports are not taking place. This has led to the popularity of virtual sports among the fans.

In order to maintain their fanbase and generate advertising revenues, the organizers of sports such as horse-racing, motor-racing, football, boxing, baseball, cycling, etc. are increasingly streaming virtual sports on various online platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and even are broadcasting virtual sporting events on traditional television platforms.

As people are not being able to enjoy the real games, they are turning to live streaming and broadcasting of virtual sports, and taking pleasure in watching participants playing games. They are also themselves excitedly taking part in those video games.

MotoGP has introduced the "Stay At Home GP" virtual races. These virtual tournaments are proving out to be eventful motorcycle races as spectators are extremely glad to watch what they have been missing for a long time. They are thrilled to watch motorcycle racing legends once again competing with each other.

British broadcaster Sky broadcasted virtual Bahrain Grand Prix, which proved to be a great success. The e-WBSS (World Boxing Super Series) organized a virtual boxing tournament with some of the best boxers. The fights were arranged between those boxers that we one can only think of fighting against each other in his or her dreams. The tournament drew massive audience engagement and proved to be a great success.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the importance of virtual sports for people has strengthened. Virtual sporting events provide a great way for organizers to generate revenue from advertising, while for the brands they turn out to be an effective way to reach audiences through advertising.

But with consumers' cross-screen behavior, brands cannot fully achieve their advertising goals by advertising only on TV. A study showed that more than 90% of the participants kept a smartphone near them while watching TV, just like the remote control of TV. To capitalize on the cross-screen behavior of consumers, it has become important for marketers to use the TV sync technology.

TV syncing allows marketers to show ads on a viewer’s smartphone through social media platforms at the same time when same or related ads are appearing on the TV. This sync marketing technology also allows communicating brand messages through second screens right at the moment when something important occurs in the virtual sports competitions such as a goal during a virtual football match.

Two types of TV sync are available - self-sync and competition-sync. Self-sync allows a brand to capitalize on TV viewers’ cross-screen behavior by simultaneously displaying its own ads on both TV and social media. Competition sync allows a brand to capitalize on competitors’ TV ads by displaying its ads on social media at the same time when its competitor’s TV commercial is running.

During the coronavirus times, when virtual sports are being adored by sports fans across the globe, the real-time sports syncadvertising technology offers a perfect way to brands to communicate their messages by leveraging consumers' cross-screen behavior.   

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