More marketers are leveraging the power of YouTube ads because its dominance in the digital advertising landscape isn’t slowing down.
Remember when smoking cigarettes was cool? So do we. It was so cool that advertisers would blow their budgets to flight aspirational cigarette ads between movie trailers at the cinema – and you could smoke in the cinema with your kids sitting next to you. Like this one from 1985, where Peter Stuyvesant punts ‘your passport to international smoking pleasure’:
A golden age. Don’t you want to jump on a Concord and swim with dolphins? Oh wait, those don’t exist anymore (the Concords, but with global warming, the dolphins probably will be a thing of the past, too).
Those ads were legendary and sold a lifestyle, albeit cut short by lung cancer. Today, cigarette ads are banned in many countries, and kids prefer to suck on flavoured carcinogenic smoke machines instead.
Times have changed, and so has advertising – and a lot of it is happening on YouTube.
Why YouTube is such a powerful ad platform
After Google, YouTube is the second-most visited website. If you’re not advertising on it, you’re losing out on massive opportunities.
There’s certainly still a place for flighting epic ads – look at the Super Bowl, where ad time costs over $7 million for a 30-second slot. But like we’ve said in a previous article, 30 seconds is a lifetime online. And now, digital marketers need to know how to leverage the likes of unskippable video ads, which is no small feat.
When not done right, it’s torturous. Or, as a very wise Redditor once wrote: “An unskippable five-second advertisement feels longer than skipping an ad after five seconds”.
(We want to know: if a Gen Z vapes in a forest and no one is around to see it, are they still cool?)
However, when done right, YouTube ads, whether skippable or unskippable, are hugely effective. That’s because:
- In 2023, YouTube’s annual ad revenue reached $31 billion
- People spend on average, almost an hour per day watching YouTube videos
- Due to YouTube ad targeting, consumers say that YouTube ads are more relevant than TV or other streaming app ads
- After google.com, YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world
- More businesses and brands are using YouTube Shorts for video ads (which is fast catching up to TikTok).
Why (short-form) video advertising is where it’s at
Video is the best way to capitalise on attention in the digital age because it’s effortless to consume.
Short-form video is even better. According to Tech Report, in 2023, daily YouTube Shorts views reached 70 billion. They also have higher engagement rates than long videos, generating almost nine times more interactions on average.
Thanks to TikTok, vertical video (filmed and viewed in portrait mode, rather than landscape) has also blown up, and YouTube Shorts now allows marketers to optimise their YouTube messaging for mobile viewing. In fact, on YouTube Shorts, vertical ads can result in 20% more conversions compared to horizontal ads.
Target your way forward
YouTube isn’t going anywhere; it’s a no-brainer for brands and businesses to utilise it for their digital advertising.
That’s because when it comes to content, marketers must consider how their target audience consumes content, because it will lead them to where that target audience is.
YouTube ads allow for granular audience targeting, so you’re not just spraying and praying. The sweet spot is when a marketing campaign has ATL elements (like your TV ads) that are augmented with a strong digital campaign (which includes YouTube ads).
For example, if we look at the Super Bowl again, we see that their 30-second primetime TV ads are often followed up with digital campaigns that create targeted engagement and expanded reach. Like the Don’t Forget Uber Eats campaign, which aired a TV ad during the Super Bowl, but also utilised digital channels to tease the ad and boost the campaign’s awareness.
And, according to Search Engine Journal, Uber Eats uploaded 36 videos to YouTube which received 26.7 million views and 28,000 engagements – an average of 743,000 views and 800 engagements per video. That’s huge.
YouTube ads can now also be run via Google video partners, high-quality publisher websites and apps where marketers can display video ads to viewers beyond YouTube, on any type of device.
The future is now
The shift towards YouTube ads reflects its growing importance in digital marketing strategies, offering higher engagement rates and better conversions.
Sure, you can get YouTube Premium which is ad-free, and with time this may affect the effectiveness of advertising on the platform, but YouTube is undeniably still a digital marketing stronghold.
YouTube has also recently confirmed that advertisers can now target paused screentime. Google started testing paused ads in 2023, and, surprise, surprise, they were lucrative.
Whether skippable, unskippable, short, or paused, YouTube advertising is a digital marketing tool not to be overlooked.
We may no longer stare wide-eyed at cigarette ads on the big screen that sell a lifestyle of catamarans and hot women. Kids now puff on CBD-infused, pumpkin-spice latte-flavoured devices. One thing’s for sure: we’re all watching cat videos on YouTube, and marketers need to go to where their audience is.
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