The story arc of a TV spot

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):

• Exposition: This establishing shot, such as an aerial view of a car winding its way through the hills of an exotic location, or a medium shot of the exterior of a house, is followed by some kind of inciting incident that creates a sense of rising action. This lead-in builds to some kind of climax or reveal.
• Climax: After the inciting incident, action continues to rise until you reach the peak of the action, a climax that has a big reveal, followed by a sense of falling action. The climax is where you might start to talk about your offering.
• Denouement: The TV commercial ends with resolution — for example, the brand of the advertiser and a call to action as to how the offer can be unlocked. The brand’s logo typically appears in the denouement.

The story arc of a YouTube ad

Video advertisements made specifically for YouTube are different than one for TV commercials, which are described in the previous section.

Video advertisements

• Grab attention: Immediately grabbing the viewer’s attention with an eye-catching hook is crucial. You can grab attention with an impactful visual combined with audio (see Figure 6-2).
• Reveal: After you have the viewer’s attention, you can start to reveal the marketing message and the brand through subtle branding cues.
• Keep the attention and provide direction: Keeping the viewer’s attention, provide direction on what he can do next — for example, watch another video, visit your YouTube channel or click through to your website to buy a product.

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.

Get some inspiration from the Ads Leaderboard, a YouTube tool that helps show you the best ads out there. The YouTube Ads Leaderboard showcases the top ten ads that people choose to watch each month on YouTube. Visit www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/video/leaderboards.

Your messages

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.

Nothing is stopping you from making several video ads. Good advertising creative tends to focus on the core message you want people to remember.

Pull together a list of your messages

• Your brand
• The name of your product or service
• Any price and special promotions
• Features, especially those that set you apart from the competition
• Testimonials from people who have used your product or service
• Reasons why people should buy your product or service
• Where people can buy it or other calls to action
• Any other pertinent messages that are required to deliver against your marketing brief’s needs.

Creating a matrix of your messages is an easy approach to help break out the different messages you may want to communicate in your ad campaign. You can add other variables, such as targeting different messages to different people, or different ad formats.

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).

Your brand assets

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

• The name of your brand and the name of your product or service
• Your logo and tagline (if you have one)
• Typography, which refers to the style of any text you include, such as font, color, and size choices
• Shapes, images, and visuals that accompany your brand’s visual treatment, such as an animated version of your logo
• Tone or style of voice that you use for any spoken portions of the video — for example, you may be casual and friendly or more formal and academic.
• Colors, especially if you have a bold singular color choice that appears across all your brand assets
• Mascots, jingles or even sponsored celebrity endorsements.

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.

If you’re interested in creating a consistent set of brand assets, you may want to build a brand style guide. A brand style guide covers everything from logos to lettering.

Existing video assets

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

• Use previously existing video footage of their product to make a simple six-second ad recut with a quick voiceover and a link.
• Leverage b-roll content from tradeshows and retail location events.
• Make use of footage from conferences and interviews.

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.

Don’t download and re-use other people’s video footage unless you obtain permission first. You can reach out to people on YouTube and simply ask them for permission to use their footage.

Your mandatories

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

• Brand assets, such as your logo at the very least
• Additional offer information, such as redemption and expiration details
• Legal disclaimers required by your category
• Copyright and trademark notices

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.

Getting attention

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.

• Audio: Whether it’s sound effects, music, or voiceover, you can use audio to grab attention. You can experiment with the pacing of your audio — for example, the narrator may be speaking quickly or the music may be fast-paced.

• Super supers: A super refers to something like text superimposed over a video to get attention (see Figure 6-3). You can try big bold text that flashes quickly as a technique to attract attention. Text also includes the title of your ad, which appears overlaid on your ad when the viewer mouses over the video.

Not all video ads are equal. A 2016 study from Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, “U.S. Video Ad Cross-Platform Research,” found that attention paid to video ads on YouTube was 1.8 times higher than on other social media platforms. The findings of this research suggest that if you’re able to grab the attention of the viewer with the video ad you’re running on YouTube, it’ll have more attention paid to it than video ads that you run on other social media sites. (For more details on the study, go to www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/attention-paid-youtube-ads-vs-social-media.

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 branding

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:

• Company name and brand logo: These items are your most obvious brand signals, so find a way to include them. You can use audio mentions of your brand name as well as text and visual.
• Watermark: A watermark is a semi-transparent logo or identifying image somewhere in the video, usually in the lower right-hand corner. This watermark can stay present throughout your video as a constant but subtle reminder of your brand.
• Actual product and its packaging: Show the product in use and include visuals of your complete range of products to help people identify the brand behind your video ad.
• Primary colors and fonts: If your brand makes use of recognizable colors and fonts including them in your visuals is a subtle signal of your brand.
• Brand jingles or audio mnemonics: If your brand uses these auditory signals, include them.

Making a connection

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

• Use emotion: Telling an emotional story that taps into how someone feels can be a great way to create a connection. An ad for an animal shelter can feature footage that tells the story of various pets available for adoption. For extra emotion, ensure that each animal is looking directly at the camera — I know, shameless but effective! Stories that invoke an emotional reaction tend to resonate with people.
• Take a sensory approach: Use video footage that taps into the viewer’s senses, showing taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. Perhaps you show someone tasting your restaurant’s food, feeling the quality of your clothing, smelling the scent of your detergent liquid, seeing the majesty of the scenery on your adventure holiday tour, or listening to sounds of the local concert hall. Think of all the ways your brand can come to life through the senses and how you can express it in sight, sound, and motion.
• Appeal to rationality: A more practical route may be to demonstrate the benefits of your product or service. In your video creative, break down the reasons why viewers should consider your offering over others. Perhaps you’ll make a short ad that hits viewers with the single best reason to purchase.
• Show behavior: Demonstrate a simple action or task that viewers can picture themselves taking. Connection is often made when people see something that they can relate to. For example, if your viewers like to travel, show video footage of people hiking and exploring.

Giving specific direction

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

• Click through to your website to learn more or purchase a product
• Call or visit a retail location
• Watch another video or playlist or visit your YouTube channel
• Complete an online survey or sign up for an email list

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.

Make use of end screens. End screens show during the last 5 to 20 seconds of videos that are at least 25 seconds long. You can add up to four elements to promote your content, channel, and websites. Elements can expand to show more information when viewers hover on desktops or tap on mobile devices. See Chapter 14 for details on how you can set up end screens.

Testing marketing messages

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:

• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing

Testing video creative

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:

• Video: Try different kinds of video, using different types of people, places, pacing, and styles of visual treatment, such as animation, to test what works best.
• Audio: Test to see whether different types of music, sound effects, voices, and other audio choices change how people respond to your ad.
• Text: Test to see whether the inclusion of text in your video ad — for example, repeating your audio message with text, helps with the performance of your ad.

You can A/B and multivariate test creative treatments (see the preceding two sections). Try something simple like using a male voiceover and a female voiceover to see which one people respond to more frequently.

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.