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Robyn Hardman, Digital Consultant
Consumers Aren’t Tuning In to Video Ads – Here’s How to Fix It
According to a recent survey, 72% of consumers don’t prefer video advertising over other forms of online advertising. Is the video trend about to take a downturn?
As a nation, we watch a lot of videos online. A study undertaken in 2017 figured that we Brits watch, on average, 53 minutes of online video per day. If that seems shocking, think about how many little clips you watch on Facebook or Instagram a day. It all adds up!
When we take this into consideration, online video advertising should be a no brainer – it’s far cheaper than buying television airtime and has the potential to reach far more people. That said, consumers now seem to be turning away from video advertising, showing no stronger preference to it over more traditional display ads. And if this is the case, is it worth your investment?
Thinking about how video ads tend to be delivered, we’re not surprised that customers are turning off. The dreaded autoplay that websites tend to encourage leaves a lot to be desired, especially when there’s no clear way to get rid of that video pop-up. What’s more, video advertising and mobile often don’t mix well, with clunky players intruding on otherwise well-designed content.
There’s also targeting to consider – it’s all well and good having your adverts out there, but if they’re being delivered to the wrong audience, they won’t have much of an effect. When planning ads in, a lot of businesses fail to drill down on the audience level to ensure their videos will hit the right people.
To get the most out of your video advertising, we think it’s best to be social and to take things into your own hands. When we helped to launch the Chateau Impney Hill Climb, we created a promo video and set up specific interest-based audience groups on Facebook, scheduling the adverts at times that we knew they’d most likely be online. Although our budget was small for this initial year, we saw 24,450 people watch the advert across six months.
Based on the success of this approach, we carried it across to the following year. Armed with more videos to promote, we doubled our efforts, but continued with a relatively modest budget – we then saw the number of views rise tenfold, with a total of 263,865.
We found this approach to be far more effective then scheduling video ads on platforms like YouTube to run ahead of other ads, or planning in video adverts with more traditional media outlet websites. By presenting the video in a format that would be more appealing to potential customers, and that suited their daily routine – sitting directly within their social media feed – we were generating a lot more interest than we may have done otherwise.
Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone – a motorsport event is perhaps an easier sell than something like toilet cleaner. However, it’s worth considering how your customers react to your content on different platforms. If your social media presence seems to get a good response generally, you’ll more than likely see a considerable return on your video investment.
Craving social success? Check out a few of our other blogs:
- YouTube to scrap 30-second unskippable ads
- Celebrating 20 years with a video for Randall & Payne
- Silence is golden: the importance of silent videos in marketing
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