Why you should never take TV ads online
Advertisers need to stop thinking of online ads as secondary to TV, writes Don’t Panic’s Joe Wade
TV ads “don’t work online”. This admission came from Tom Buday, Nestlé’s head of marketing and consumer communications speaking at Dmexco last month on the FMCG company’s online video strategy.
Shock horror.
Below-the-line content is a totally different beast to TV advertising. Nestle has created some pretty iconic pieces of advertising TV in the past – from Nespresso’s smooth partnership with George Clooney to Shreddies’ ‘Knitting Nanas’ – but a quick look at the YouTube pages shows that they don’t play out well online.
An entire series featuring Clooney has had just 100 views at the time of writing.
Nestlé isn’t alone in making this mistake; countless brands do the same, with the likes of Stella Artois, and Mars regurgitating cinematic TV ads online, with minimal engagement, views and shares.
To create a successful online campaign, you have to engage real people, get past the ad blockers and on to people’s Facebook pages. You need shareability to drive conversation and action.
Making content that engages people is not simply about making it excellent and compelling.
It is about adding in hooks to the creative that will appeal to different verticals and interest groups, it is about understanding the zeitgeist and what people are into and want to see, it is about knowing what is going to trend on a given day and making that work for you.
All of this knowledge plus many other factors, needs to feed back into the creative and inform the story you are telling.
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It’s not easy, but without the right creative thinking, the strategic insight of what will earn audiences, ads are just empty branded noise, pushed at people through algorithms or ITV.
These advertisers are also missing the opportunity online offers as a test bed for above-the-line, with flexible timeframes, specific targeting and real-time feedback. Once a video has found success online, the data gleaned can inform media spend.
An expensive feat, you can’t afford to get TV wrong, and experimenting online will feed an effective strategy. It also means you can create a longer video, which can be edited down for TV, and simply altered based on how the online version does.
Now, a new model of advertising is developing; where experimental and powerful content is created for online, and then feeds DRTV campaigns.
This model allows brands to think more creatively about video, because while TV ads often look to emulate the formula of TV, being cinematic in style, such as George Clooney for Espresso.
A view doesn’t mean anyone has paid any attention, engaged with or enjoyed content.”
Online, the format is more flexible and the desire is to provoke a reaction, not just a swoon. Namely, a share, a like, a click-through – and to provoke that, they have to be potent and endearing.
Often they are considered alongside a wider digital campaign, adapting the idea for Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Second screening has been going on for a while now; and it’s time TV took more notice of them.
Advertisers need to stop thinking of online ads as secondary to TV. Big budgets are often spent on visual masterpieces for the screen, and online creative is left, neglected with some leftover props and a celebrity voiceover.
Online video has huge potential to drive engagement, recognition and change, and deserves the right investment to create content and strategy that delivers.
Thankfully though, for ad agencies, racking up a view through Facebook and YouTube has never been easier – recently we discovered that Facebook overestimates average watch time by up to 80% – some ad spend behind it and the bots will get to work.
It enables the agency to say ‘we delivered a million views!’
Sound familiar, and want to know if you have bought a load of fake views on your video? It’s simple: it comes down to engagement rates, which should be the key metric for measuring success on Facebook and YouTube. This puts the focus on likes, shares and comments.
If you have a million views but only a few hundred likes, barely any comments and shares – that means no-one has seen your vid.
Basically, a view doesn’t mean anyone has paid any attention, engaged with or enjoyed content.
It is possible to create powerful and clever content that will find people organically, and can be boosted with some strategic ad spend. But more investment needs to be made in content that grabs people’s attention and keeps it, and that earns the full view.
Video is an incredibly powerful tool, but what we’re seeing online isn’t hitting the mark, because it’s not getting the respect that it deserves.
Making content that generates shares conveniently solves the issue of ad blocking and is another reason to do things differently.
You can’t pay to get inside people’s heads. You need to earn it.
Joe Wade is managing director and co-founder of Don’t Panic