We’ve all been there, you go to watch a YouTube video — but first, a 30-second commercial you have to try your hardest to get through to just watch the thing you went there for. While you stare at the ad countdown you have a few thoughts…
At about 5 seconds into the ad, you’re wondering if this will even be worth it.
At 10 seconds in you take a look at your phone to see if you have any notifications.
At 20 seconds in you’ve likely forgotten what you were even about to watch and probably thought of something new to search for.
At 30 seconds, it feels like you’ve been waiting for several minutes, but the time has finally come to get the content you showed up for.
Then, when you’re about 5 seconds into the video you went there for, you’ve likely already forgot completely about the ad you just watched.
you’ve likely already forgotten completely about the ad you just watched.
This is the experience for people while searching the internet for something. Sometimes it’s at the beginning of a video, sometimes it’s on the sidebar of the website hosting the video, but it’s never the thing we showed up to see. As people grow more and more annoyed, video ads become less and less effective.
So how can you make video ads that people don’t hate?
1 – Don’t stand in the way of a person and their content.
Instead of being the annoyance in between a person and their content, find a way to be the content. Be the thing they were searching for. You might be able to introduce your brand or product in video ads but you don’t want to be known as the annoying brand that seems to always be interrupting a user’s video experience.
2 – Don’t worry about getting people to buy your product immediately.
Part of the annoyance of ads comes from a natural (and growing) distrust people have with ads. Part of using ads to sell a product or service is to build a relationship. If a person were to introduce themselves and ask you for money 30 seconds later, you’d likely say “not a chance”. So why would it be any different if a business did the same thing? There are 6 steps to making a sale with advertising, not 1 step. Pace yourself and say the right things at the right time.
3 – Understand your audience and direct a message to them.
A big problem with advertising is that people are often not interested in a product that’s being pitched to them. This is usually because of a failure to direct content to a target audience. Maybe you’d think the best result of an ad campaign would be to get thousands of eyes on your product but truth is, it would be better to get far fewer of a target audience than a large general audience. The more specific the audience is that you’re targeting the less annoying an ad would be to the people watching.
4 – Give them something.
Another way to fight the dishonesty is to build trust by giving something completely free. This could be done by giving specialty information about your industry to viewers for free. As an example, If you were a restaurant, you could give away a recipe for one of your dishes. Yes, they’d then have one of your recipes but you now seem like a caring company that means the absolute best for people.
5 – Make them feel something.
The one thing people connect with more than anything is emotions like joy, sadness, fear, etc… Ads that are liked and remembered the most have this one thing in common, they make you feel something. By simply telling a story you can make this connection and at the same time create an ad people share and actually want to watch over and over.
