YouTube’s system of TrueView ads (skippable video advertisements that play before the video a user is trying to view) have worked quite well for the company thus far. Giving the advertiser the ability to pay only for the advertisements that users view in full, YouTube has pioneered a new, more effective way to market to customers through video. With the entire world going from internet to mobile these days, of course YouTube has one of the more successful apps on the market. After a few years of mobile success, YouTube has finally made the decision to bring their pre-roll ads to their app, allowing video advertisements to reach the vast audience in the mobile market.
In an Ad Age article written by Jason Del Ray, he writes,
YouTube says that 65% of pre-roll ads on YouTube now allow viewers to skip them. That penetration coupled with the explosion of content consumption on mobile devices made the ads’ extension a no-brainer, the company said.
The significance of these new mobile video advertisements is clear. For the most part, mobile advertisements have tended to be extensions of desktop advertising campaigns, as advertisers have seen good results from them. More recently, however, marketers have started to get creative, catering ads specifically to the mobile community. With YouTube’s mobile video ads, there is now a new way to target mobile users through the video ads that have been so useful on desktop platforms. Also, allowing them to be skippable, YouTube will probably see similar success with their mobile video ads to that which they continuously see with desktop video ads.
According to Ad Age, Jason Spero who is head of mobile sales at Google sees the same trends starting with mobile marketing.
Advertisers, meanwhile, are getting better at making the most of mobile, according to Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google. Where most advertisers previously used mobile ads to extend their desktop campaigns, they are increasingly using different calls to action even when the creative remains the same, he explained. “Finally, we’re starting to see people think of it as a complementary set of channels,” he said.
With mobile gaining more and more steady ground each day, increasing rapidly in popularity, these video advertisements were a perfect idea from YouTube. Surely, many marketers will jump on the opportunity to more efficiently market to mobile users. And since YouTube’s app has over 100 million downloads in the Google Play Store alone, giving it a spot at number five in the top free downloads section, the performance of these video ads is bound to be impressive.
For now, the mobile pre-roll ads will only be available on Android devices, due to issues with the pre-installed YouTube applications on iOS devices. The thing that YouTube and Android both have in common is Google, and Google just continues to benefit in the marketing community. With all of these Google owned companies doing so well in marketing alongside Google itself, it is evident that trying to compete with the company is becoming much more of a lost cause.
