Google Video Ads: Arrington Refuted + Creating Profitable Video Ads
Google launched click-to-play video ads for AdWords today. Google will currently syndicate these ads to AdSense publishers only, and not in the Google SERPs themselves.

Michael Arrington of the highly-influential TechCrunch blog is "betting against" its success, as is Seamus McCauley.

Arrington's primary arguments against the service and my responses are:
+If it's not in the SERPs, advertisers won't be as interested.
(agreed! And you can bet the BIG advertisers agree too. Watch for these ads in SERPs very shortly.)
+Videos don't click through to a site and therefore don't deliver measurable value.
(There's more to advertising than what can be measured on a website. Such as branding. Also, does anyone know if the video ads include actual links to the advertiser's site once they've played? I suspect they will... and that advertisers will be able to measure who clicks through after watching an ad and whether they're more likely to convert)
+SpotRunner already does the job.
(I think SpotRunner is a great way to get TV ads for small businesses! But why can't I put my SpotRunner ads on Google Video ads too? Will we see a SpotRunner/Google partnership? Also, what if I'm a big brand and already make my own ads?)
+People don't want to click on video ads.
(Arrington's (antiquated) concept of what an ad is partly inspired the second part of this post. Read on.)
+Video ads take longer to make than text ads. This will mean less video advertisers and therefore lower the pay-per-play cost.
(This is true, but will it push prices so low that Google will actually lose money on them? And what about areas of high competition? What better way to stand out than with a video ad? I think we will see an emerging breed of marketers who specialize in video ads JUST for search engines.)
+AdSense publishers will make less money with these ads.
(True. And we will likely see them move onto Google's main SERPs shortly, and on publishers' sites only if they opt into them.)

Garett Rogers at ZDNet thinks Google video ads will work too.

My Initial Thoughts on Creating Profitable Video Ads
Proper philosophy on which to build your video ad: I believe that marketing should improve the world in some way. That's why, in my description of article marketing, I say:

It's the willingness to be helpful, complete, detailed, precise and honest in your articles that will deliver not only conversions, but the kinds of relationships that bring you long term business success.

Also, a year and a half ago, in a post entitled Ads as Movies, I wrote:

When will a company create a feature film? Product placements are common as commercials. Soon I think we'll (perhaps) see movie studios run by the [advertisers] themselves.

I mention these statements because of the nature of Google's new video ad offering.

These video ads are on-demand, and will be ranked based on how often they're watched, much as Google's paid search ads are ranked based on how often they're clicked.

If you're going to be a video advertiser on Google - and I highly advise that you at least try it out - you would do well to lean away from the kind of advertising you're used to seeing on television and towards ads that are "helpful, complete, detailed, precise and honest." Just as your articles and blog posts should be.

Especially if you're in the B2B space.

Think "how to" + news casts + iron chef. Think quirky. These should be spots that you're pleased to put up on your site as resources for the industry and your potential customers.

Creating helpful, resource-oriented videos will ensure that they're watched more frequently, and all the way through (duration of the view will likely be a metric Google uses to determine a video ad's placement).

If you're marketing in the B2C I would look at creating an entertainment series, a sort of a soap opera that will establish your brand with potential viewers.

I would also investigate ways to tie in consumer generated video... how could you encourage your existing client base to send in video? Snap's doing an incredible job with getting others to generate ideas for their relaunch campaign. Leverage your clients/prospects/users for video if you're working on the cheap.

Also - you'll have about 3 seconds to catch peoples' attention and let them know the value that watching your video will deliver.

Either way, if you want to make video on the cheap investigate machinima. Me, Adam Schultz and Stephan Ward have something cooking along these lines. We'll buy a Google video ad for our project and let you know what happens.

In summary, I think that if marketers make video ads that are, in themselves, valuable to their target audience that the Google video ads initiative will be successful. And even if the majority of marketers don't move in this direction I think that, once the ads are available in the main body of Google's SERPs, major brand advertisers will make it a profitable venture for Google.

update Upon reading through the comments in Arrington's post I find that in comment 33 "FWIW without going into any details my company has tried pay per click video ads, and we have found that the click through rate on a video ad is 20x higher than a standard adSense word type ad. That was on a popualtion of a few hundred thousand spots per day over a month. Your mileage may vary…."

Of course it's not clear if this was done through Google's program or not...
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |