Don’t click here to be advertised to

If you’ve been to YouTube in the last year - and who hasn’t? - You would have noticed that many of the videos now have pre-roll adverts on them. YouTube call them TrueView Ads, and they’re working out very well for the advertising industry.

Launched in December 2010, they let viewers choose to watch the ad or skip it if they're not interested. The advertisers only pay when someone chooses to watch their message, which according to YouTube is an average of 15-45% of the time.

There is an interesting behavioural insight behind the approach of adding a button asking viewers to “skip this ad”. What if the message before your selected video said “would you like to watch an ad?”. I’m guessing no-one would click it.

But the interaction is the same in both instances, only worded differently. The behavioural response is dramatically different however.

This technique is known as presumed consent, and is most evident in the up-take of organ donors around the world. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, refers to this in his TED talk where countries that ask you to tick the box to opt-out of organ donation rather than tick to opt-in have vastly more people on the list of donors.

The behavioural insight is that people don’t tick. Seemingly regardless of what it says.

Historically banner ads have had the reverse problem. Not being allowed to have any animation or sound until a user clicks them, so as not to be disruptive to the page content, means they just sit there begging to be played with.

It means we’ve moved from ‘Click here to be advertised to’ to ‘Don’t click here to be advertised to’.

But what does this mean for messaging and creative development? With metrics still showing gradual attrition through the run-time of an ad, we find ourselves in a ‘grab them by the balls and don’t let go’ attitude to the narratives.

Back in the nineties Jakob Nielsen, an early usability guru, referred to it as 'inverse pyramids in cyberspace' which is actually what any good tabloid writer knows all about. You need to grab the readers with the headline unlike traditional advertising where you build up to the messaging/the twist/the gag at the end. The messaging pyramid is inverted.

For me it’s about really getting back to the basics of good content: tell a story, be entertaining, be informative.

Forcing the first few seconds of your ad on viewers can actually be a great opportunity - If the audience has their attention grabbed from the out-set then they should stick around to see out the duration. It’s a very democratic option for the viewers, bad ads will fail, good ones won’t. And we should embrace this rather than fear it.