Anyone that has YouTube has fallen victim to the advertisements at the beginning of videos. A person will click on the video that they so direly want to see and then BAM, they have to wait a minute for the advertisement to play out. Sometimes, a person may get lucky and be given the option to skip the video, but more often than not, the person is going to have to watch the video in its entirety.
However, companies make the grave mistake of having their ad placed before a video and having the video be incredibly dull. From personal experience, I have come to loathe certain companies for wasting my time and subjecting me to a video that reminds me of a lecture class that is being led by a monotonous professor.
Why would a company want to bore their potential buyers? It just isn’t good business to make a buyer completely uninterested in your business. You want the buyer to be drawn in and excited about the company, not put off from it.
It would benefit companies to watch the popular videos of the times and learn what makes a good video. If a person is forced to watch the advertisement, try and make it interesting enough for them not to start hoping for the skip button to pop up.
I’ve seen ads before videos that were so interesting that I ignored the skip button and watched the rest of the ad voluntarily. Why? Because they made it interesting. It wasn’t just a person talking to the screen about the company on a black background; they started it out with something that sparked my interest, pushing me to want to see how it unfolds.
With today’s youth, a company needs to fight against the millions of other distractions they have. A user can more than easily just pull up their Twitter on another tab as the ad plays, thus further emphasizing the need to keep the video interesting.
Relevancy is another very important concept to focus on. No one wants to see a gangnam style video now, those videos have been overplayed and used up by now, so if a company were to use them now, a user would most likely huff and roll their eyes at the attempt.
YouTube is a valuable tool for marketing, but used improperly and it will prove to be more of a nuisance than anything.