With the thousands of hours your target customer spends on YouTube, I can’t blame you for thinking that pre-roll ads — those 10- to 15-second promotional videos you see before you play a video — seem like a good idea.
After all, you’re catching your audience while they’re in the mood to watch a video, and they’re pretty much trapped unless they want to exit the video entirely. Despite their situational appropriateness, pre-roll ads are shockingly ineffective. They maintain a laughable 94 percent skip-through rate, and without intentional planning, they can quickly alienate your customers.
Fortunately, this is the age of video marketing, and you have alternatives that you can (and should) use.
Pre-roll ads simply don’t measure up to the YouTube generation’s expectations for interest and engagement. Even if your target audience bothers to stay on the channel without clicking the 'skip ad' button, there’s still no guarantee that they’re interested in watching your ad or engaging with the content. In fact, if you don’t carefully target your pre-roll ad to align with the content the visitor is trying to view, you could even damage your brand.
By actively clicking 'play' on the original video content, viewers are engaging with the content in a native format and making it clear that they want to interact with it. This process is in direct opposition with the passive, forced viewing brought on by pre-roll advertisements.
Fortunately, you don’t have to channel your entire budget into this method with less-than-impressive success rates.
Instead, you can create a blend of online video ads and branded content that will deliver authentic impressions and help you develop a better vehicle for marketing on YouTube.
Target has done a fantastic job of blending native content with its own video content to generate views and engage audiences through YouTube partnerships. These videos also tap into different verticals, from back-to-school styles to baby videos. This allows the brand to reach a much wider audience than it could through television and print alone.
GoPro is another prime example of a brand that has effectively engaged audiences through the use of both natively integrated content and effective banner ads.
By focusing on product ratings, reviews, and action-packed video sequences shot by outdoor enthusiasts, the brand has done a fantastic job of creating banner ads that appeal to a large demographic base interested in its products.
That being said, sometimes brands simply can’t avoid incorporating pre-roll into their digital marketing toolbox. If you do need to utilize pre-roll ads, make sure you focus on mobile.
Pre-roll ads on mobile provide significantly higher click-through rates, and more than 50 percent of mobile users say that they’re positive or neutral about pre-roll ads on their phones.
Additionally, you should narrow your target audience by geography, language, demographics, topics, and interests. Pre-roll ads drive more traffic when they match the content that the audience is interested in watching. Targeted placements that have little correlation with the advertisement simply won’t perform well.
Your pre-roll ads will also be more effective if they’re closely related to the video your customer is trying to view. This kind of native integration is more cost-effective than attempting to build out your own content online. A great compromise is to supplement your budding video creation with partnerships in exchange for an opportunity to build an audience base and scale your content in the future.
Lastly, consider developing pre-roll ads that can be manipulated into different viewer experiences. When it comes to increasing brand awareness, association, and purchase intent, interactive pre-roll advertisements tend to perform better than regular pre-roll ads.
Though pre-roll ads seemed positioned to work perfectly in this video age, they simply don’t fit the target audience anymore. The YouTube generation wants instant access to whatever they want to see. Waiting in any form — even a few seconds — is a major turnoff, and it sets your brand off on the wrong foot for an effective engagement.
If you can, diversify your video marketing across more effective alternatives. And if you absolutely must use pre-roll ads, make sure you maximize them by optimizing for mobile, demographics, and interactivity.
Thanks to Pete Borum for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Pete Borum is the co-founder and CEO of Reelio, where he oversees the business, creative, and engineering teams that power some of YouTube's most effective branded content partnerships. Reelio's proprietary technology analyzes social data to identify the ideal YouTube partners for any audience and budget, and then automates every aspect of working with them - allowing brands to identify and recruit talent, manage creative approvals, track performance, and remit payments, all from one place. You can reach Pete at [email protected] or LinkedIn.
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