Use your Videos to Advertise on YouTube, Hulu and more.

We’ve all spent too many hours getting sucked down the YouTube spiral. You find yourself looking up a “how to” type video and then five videos later you’ve become an expert at that craft you’ll find that you also learned about new products and brands from the ads you saw. Marketers are getting more and more involved in video advertising with YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook and streaming services like Hulu.

Do you ever wonder where and how to get started? It’s simple, identify your audience and message and then you can select the platforms that will work best for you. Once that’s checked off your list work with us to create your videos for your campaign.

YouTube has three types of video advertising:

1. True View Videos

Advertisers really like TrueView Ads because they only pay when viewers interact or watch their ad. These ads can vary in length, they can be anywhere between 12 seconds and 6 minutes. There are two types of ads within True View: Video Discovery Ads and In-Stream Ads. Video discovery ads show up on the YouTube homepage, search results pages and as related videos on YouTube video watch pages. In-Stream videos are the ones you are probably most familiar with. These are the ones that play before the video you’ve selected. You can choose to skip them after a five seconds or so. These videos can be placed anywhere in the Google Display Network, that might be a whole other blog, but basically it can show other places than YouTube.

The secret to creating successful videos for TrueView advertising is to tell an engaging story right from the start that makes your audience want to know what happens next. People love seeing emotion or something they can empathize with. They also love being surprised, so if you can make your video grab their attention they might be less tempted to skip.

Check out how Youtube explains these adds with puppies everywhere. Intrigued? Exactly…

2. Preroll Ads

These are very straightforward and enticing to marketers because you really have your audiences full attention. Preroll ads are non-skippable and can play before, in the middle or after the main video. These can be 20 seconds or less in duration. It’s important to create quality Preroll Ads so the viewer doesn’t get disinterested in the content and want to move on. When video quality is taken into consideration the viewer sometimes doesn’t even notice they are watching an ad.

3. Bumpers

Bumper ads are the shortest type of YouTube video ad. They are usually ~6 seconds or less. In such a short snippet it’s important to make a quick impression. These short videos are usually a brand logo over an enticing image with music. Make it memorable and make it part of your larger campaign. A viewer needs to interact with your brand many times before you can become memorable to them. Here’s a short and sweet (and funny to boot!) one we found.

One Floor Up has been working with many brands and corporations to create video campaigns for all sorts of advertising. Working with YouTube is one of our favorites as we are nerds and love the data it comes with. If you want to talk about video advertising or creating video for your campaigns set up some time to talk to us!