The Atrocious Waste of Money That Is Cold Video Advertising
There was a time in advertising history where the TV commercial dominated the attention of your everyday consumer. Families sitting around their TV set eating TV dinners enjoyed Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks and Alka-Seltzer ads that took the format of 30 to 60-second mini-movies.
Nearly seven decades later, and everything has changed about that.
Not only has the effectiveness of TV commercials diminished, but platforms like Netflix and Hulu now have the most consumer attention because they’re ad-free. So what does that mean for your YouTube ads campaigns?
1. Consumers Have More Control Today Than Ever.
Today, your average consumer has more control over what and how many ads they see daily. Never has video consumption been more customized; now, on YouTube, people can skip ads that are 15 seconds or longer after only five seconds of view time. Compare this to TV advertising and, while viewers can still change the channel, it actually becomes less effective to run cold “brand awareness” video campaigns on YouTube and other video streaming platforms than it does on cable networks.
Users on YouTube don’t have to change the channel. All they have to do is wait your ad out while they browse Tik Tok or Instagram or simply skip it after five seconds. You could make the same argument for traditional TV ads as well, but all in all, this means fewer conversions, a lower conversion rate, and higher costs per acquisition.
2. Attention Spans Have Dropped.
You should never expect even your 15-second brand awareness and consideration ad to grab the attention of everyone who sees it. Because of technology and all the conversations around it, people just aren’t as patient today as they used to be.
According to the guys over at Raindrop Marketing (the geniuses behind the Dr. Squatch Soap YouTube campaigns), you need to recapture your viewer’s attention in your video ads every ten seconds. And unless you’ve managed to design a 10-second video ad deserving of an Emmy Award on your first go, you’ll be spending an exorbitant amount of money experimenting, testing, hiring, firing, and “optimizing” before you find a winner.
3. Simply Put, No One Cares.
This is a tried-and-true mantra in the world of push marketing in general (the act of interrupting the consumer’s daily activities with your advertising). At the end of the day, you’re betting on the possibility that your video ad will sell your brand and/or product that no one’s heard of before to thousands of people. In 2021, this is a large waste of money.
The best place for video advertising to be is in your remarketing and retargeting campaigns, not your brand awareness campaigns. You should be utilizing a solid SEO strategy to organically market your brand to the billions of consumers searching the web every single day. Not only does this cost astronomically less than running cold brand awareness video campaigns on YouTube for thousands of dollars, but its benefits are also triple that of any single advertising campaign.
Create an SEO Strategy That Boosts Awareness with The Text Tank.
Get started organically ranking your website and boosting awareness with content creation that blasts away the competition.
